A Comparative Study of Neural Network Optimization Techniques

In the last years we developed ENZO, an evolutionary neural network optimizer which we compare in this study to standard techniques for topology optimization: optimal brain surgeon (OBS), magnitude based pruning (MbP), and unit-OBS, an improved algorithm deduced from OBS. The algorithms are evaluated on several benchmark problems. We conclude that using an evolutionary algorithm as meta-heuristic like ENZO does is currently the best available optimization technique with regard to network size and performance. We show that the time complexity of ENZO is similar to magnitude based pruning and unit-OBS, while achieving significantly smaller topologies. Standard OBS is outperformed in both size reduction and time complexity.