Adaptive Regularization in Neural Network Modelling

In this paper we address the important problem of optimizing regularization parameters in neural network modeling. The suggested optimization scheme is an extended version of the recently presented algorithm [25]. The idea is to minimize an empirical estimate - like the cross-validation estimate - of the generalization error with respect to regularization parameters. This is done by employing a simple iterative gradient descent scheme using virtually no additional programming overhead compared to standard training. Experiments with feed-forward neural network models for time series prediction and classification tasks showed the viability and robustness of the algorithm. Moreover, we provided some simple theoretical examples in order to illustrate the potential and limitations of the proposed regularization framework.