A Yet Faster Version of Complex-valued Multilayer Perceptron Learning
using Singular Regions and Search Pruning
Seiya Satoh and Ryohei Nakano
Department of Computer Science, Chubu University, 1200 Matsumoto-cho, Kasugai 487-8501, Japan
Keywords:
Complex-valued Multilayer Perceptron, Learning Method, Singular Region, Search Pruning.
Abstract:
In the search space of a complex-valued multilayer perceptron having J hidden units, C-MLP(J), there are
singular regions, where the gradient is zero. Although singular regions cause serious stagnation of learning,
there exist narrow descending paths from the regions. Based on this observation, a completely new learning
method called C-SSF (complex singularity stairs following) 1.0 was proposed, which utilizes singular regions
to generate starting points of C-MLP(J) search. Although C-SSF1.0 finds excellent solutions of successive
C-MLPs, it takes long CPU time because the number of searches increases as J gets larger. To deal with this
problem, C-SSF1.1 was proposed, a few times faster by the introduction of search pruning, but it still remained
unsatisfactory. In this paper we propose a yet faster C-SSF1.3, going further with search pruning, and then
evaluate the method in terms of solution quality and processing time.
1 INTRODUCTION
Complex-valued neural networks (Hirose, 2012) have
the attractive features real-valued ones don’t have. A
complex-valued multilayer perceptron (C-MLP) can
naturally represent a periodic and/or unbounded func-
tion, which is not easy at all for a real-valued MLP.
Among learning methods of C-MLPs, complex
back propagation (C-BP) (Kim and Guest, 1990; Le-
ung and Haykin, 1991) is basic and well-known.
A higher-order learning method was proposed to
get better performance (Amin et al., 2011). Com-
plex Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (C-BFGS)
(Suzumura and Nakano, 2013) finds nice solutions af-
ter many independent runs.
There exist flat subspaces called singular regions
in the C-MLP search space (Nitta, 2013), as is the
case with a real-valued MLP (Fukumizu and Amari,
2000). Singular regions have been avoided (Amari,
1998) because they cause serious stagnation of learn-
ing. However, they can be utilized as excellent initial
points when we perform search for successive num-
bers of hidden units. This viewpoint led to the in-
vention of a completely new learning method. Ac-
tually, a method called SSF (Singularity Stairs Fol-
lowing) (Satoh and Nakano, 2013) was proposed
for real-valued MLPs, utilizing reducibility mapping
(Fukumizu and Amari, 2000) and eigenvector descent
(Satoh and Nakano, 2012). It stably and successively
found excellent solutions.
Recently a complex version of SSF, called C-SSF
1.0, was proposed (Satoh and Nakano, 2014), uti-
lizing complex reducibility mapping (Nitta, 2004),
eigenvector descent, and C-BFGS. It stably found ex-
cellent solutions in C-MLP search space, whose so-
lution quality was better than C-BFGS. However, it
took several times longer than C-BFGS. To make C-
SSF1.0 faster, C-SSF1.1 (Satoh and Nakano, 2015)
was proposed by introducing search pruning. It ran a
few times faster than C-SSF1.0 without losing the su-
perb solution quality, but still remained unsatisfactory
in processing time.
This paper proposes a yet faster version of C-SSF
called C-SSF1.3 by introducing two contrivances:
putting a ceiling on the number of searches and utiliz-
ing multiple best solutions to generate starting points.
Our experiments compare solution quality and pro-
cessing time of the proposed C-SSF1.3 with those of
C-SSF1.1, C-BP, and C-BFGS.
2 SINGULAR REGIONS
This section explains how singular regions are gener-
ated. Consider a complex-valued MLP with J hidden
units, C-MLP(J), whose output is f
J
.