Techniques to Prevent Overfitting in Neural Networks


One of the most common problems that is encountered while training deep neural networks is overfitting.

Overfitting occurs when a model tries to predict a trend in data that is too noisy. This is the caused due to an overly complex model with too many parameters. A model that is overfitted is inaccurate because the trend does not reflect the reality present in the data. This can be judged if the model produces good results on the seen data(training set) but performs poorly on the unseen data(test set). The goal of a machine learning model is to generalize well from the training data to any data from the problem domain. This is very important as we want our model to make predictions in the future on data that it has never seen before.


1. Simplifying The Model

The first step when dealing with overfitting is to decrease the complexity of the model. To decrease the complexity, we can simply remove layers or reduce the number of neurons to make the network smaller. While doing this, it is important to calculate the input and output dimensions of the various layers involved in the neural network. There is no general rule on how much to remove or how large your network should be. But, if your neural network is overfitting, try making it smaller.

2. Early Stopping

Early stopping is a form of regularization while training a model with an iterative method, such as gradient descent. Since all the neural networks learn exclusively by using gradient descent, early stopping is a technique applicable to all the problems. This method update the model so as to make it better fit the training data with each iteration. Up to a point, this improves the model’s performance on data on the test set. Past that point however, improving the model’s fit to the training data leads to increased generalization error. Early stopping rules provide guidance as to how many iterations can be run before the model begins to overfit.

This technique is shown in the above diagram. As we can see, after some iterations, test error has started to increase while the training error is still decreasing. Hence the model is overfitting. So to combat this, we stop the model at the point when this starts to happen.


3. Use Data Augmentation

In the case of neural networks, data augmentation simply means increasing size of the data which helps in better generalization. Some of the popular image augmentation techniques are flipping, translation, rotation, scaling, changing brightness, adding noise etcetera.Using data augmentation a lot of similar images can be generated. This helps in increasing the dataset size and thus reduce overfitting. The reason is that, as we add more data, the model is unable to overfit all the samples, and is forced to generalize.


4.Use Regularization

Regularization is a technique to reduce the complexity of the model. It does so by adding a penalty term to the loss function. The most common techniques are known as $L1$ and $L2$ regularization:

The $L1$ penalty aims to minimize the absolute value of the weights. This is mathematically shown in the below formula.

The $L2$ penalty aims to minimize the squared magnitude of the weights. This is mathematically shown in the below formula.

The below table compares both the regularization techniques.


So which technique is better at avoiding overfitting? The answer is — it depends. If the data is too complex to be modelled accurately then $L2$ is a better choice as it is able to learn inherent patterns present in the data. While $L1$ is better if the data is simple enough to be modelled accurately. For most of the computer vision problems, $L2$ regularization almost always gives better results. However, $L1$ has an added advantage of being robust to outliers. So the correct choice of regularization depends on the problem that we are trying to solve.

5. Use Dropouts

Dropout is a regularization technique that prevents neural networks from overfitting. Regularization methods like $L1$ and $L2$ reduce overfitting by modifying the cost function. Dropout on the other hand, modify the network itself. It randomly drops neurons from the neural network during training in each iteration. When we drop different sets of neurons, it’s equivalent to training different neural networks. The different networks will overfit in different ways, so the net effect of dropout will be to reduce overfitting.



This technique is shown in the above diagram. As we can see, dropouts are used to randomly remove neurons while training of the neural network. This technique has proven to reduce overfitting to a variety of problems involving image classification, image segmentation, word embeddings, semantic matching etcetera.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NEURAL NETWORKS AND DEEP LEARNING CST 395 CS 5TH SEMESTER HONORS COURSE NOTES - Dr Binu V P, 9847390760

About Me Syllabus Previous Year Question Papers CST 395 Neural Network and Deep Learning Module 1 ( Basics of Machine Learning) Overview of Machine Learning Machine Learning Algorithm Linear Regression Capacity, Overfitting and Underfitting Regularization Hyperparameters and Validation Sets Estimators, Bias , Variance and Consistency Challenges In Machine Learning Linear and Logistic Regression ( Python code) Performance Measures Differentiation of  sigmoid and cross entropy function Gradient Descent, Stochastic, Batch and mini batch gradient descent Regression with Gradient Descent Module-2 (Neural Networks) Introduction to Neural Networks Application of Neural Networks Basic Architecture- Single Layer Neural Network Power of Function Composition- Non Linear Activation XOR Activation Functions Choice of activation and loss functions Multi Layer Neural Network, Back Propagation Back Propagation- Example Implementation of a two layer network(XOR) with sigmoid activation functio...
Read more

Syllabus CST 395 Neural Network and Deep Learning

Syllabus Module - 1 (Basics of Machine Learning ) Machine Learning basics - Learning algorithms - Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement, overfitting, Underfitting, Hyper parameters and Validation sets, Estimators -Bias and Variance. Challenges in machine learning. Simple Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Performance measures - Confusion matrix, Accuracy, Precision, Recall, Sensitivity, Specificity, Receiver Operating Characteristic curve( ROC), Area Under Curve(AUC). Module -2 (Neural Networks ) Introduction to neural networks -Single layer perceptrons, Multi Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), Representation Power of MLPs, Activation functions - Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, Softmax. Risk minimization, Loss function, Training MLPs with backpropagation, Practical issues in neural network training - The Problem of Overfitting, Vanishing and exploding gradient problems, Difficulties in convergence, Local and spurious Optima, Computational Challenges. Applications of neural networks. Module 3 (D...
Read more

Introduction to neural networks

Image
Artificial neural networks are popular machine learning techniques that simulate the mechanism of learning in biological organisms. The human nervous system contains cells, which are referred to as neurons . The neurons are connected to one another with the use of axons and dendrites , and the connecting regions between axons and dendrites are referred to as synapses .The strengths of synaptic connections often change in response to external stimuli. This change is how learning takes place in living organisms. This biological mechanism is simulated in artificial neural networks, which contain computation units that are referred to as neurons . The computational units are connected to one another through weights, which serve the same role as the strengths of synaptic connections in biological organisms. Each input to a  neuron is scaled with a weight, which affects the function computed at that unit. The following figure shows both the biological and artificial neural netw...
Read more