The Compact Support Neural Network.

Publisher: MDPI Country of Publication: Switzerland NLM ID: 101204366 Publication Model: Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1424-8220 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 14248220 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Sensors (Basel) Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: Basel, Switzerland : MDPI, c2000-

Algorithms* ; Neural Networks, Computer*; Benchmarking ; Neurons ; Reproducibility of Results

Neural networks are popular and useful in many fields, but they have the problem of giving high confidence responses for examples that are away from the training data. This makes the neural networks very confident in their prediction while making gross mistakes, thus limiting their reliability for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and space exploration, etc. This paper introduces a novel neuron generalization that has the standard dot-product-based neuron and the radial basis function (RBF) neuron as two extreme cases of a shape parameter. Using a rectified linear unit (ReLU) as the activation function results in a novel neuron that has compact support, which means its output is zero outside a bounded domain. To address the difficulties in training the proposed neural network, it introduces a novel training method that takes a pretrained standard neural network that is fine-tuned while gradually increasing the shape parameter to the desired value. The theoretical findings of the paper are bound on the gradient of the proposed neuron and proof that a neural network with such neurons has the universal approximation property. This means that the network can approximate any continuous and integrable function with an arbitrary degree of accuracy. The experimental findings on standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach has smaller test errors than the state-of-the-art competing methods and outperforms the competing methods in detecting out-of-distribution samples on two out of three datasets.

Neural Comput. 1991 Summer;3(2):246-257. (PMID: 31167308)

Keywords: OOD detection; RBF networks; neural networks; universal approximation

Date Created: 20211228 Date Completed: 20211229 Latest Revision: 20211231

20231215

PMC8709146

10.3390/s21248494

34960583