Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Computer Science

Publication Date

9-16-2021

Abstract

Recently, there is a growing interest in applying Transfer Entropy (TE) in quantifying the effective connectivity between artificial neurons. In a feedforward network, the TE can be used to quantify the relationships between neuron output pairs located in different layers. Our focus is on how to include the TE in the learning mechanisms of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. We introduce a novel training mechanism for CNN architectures which integrates the TE feedback connections. Adding the TE feedback parameter accelerates the training process, as fewer epochs are needed. On the flip side, it adds computational overhead to each epoch. According to our experiments on CNN classifiers, to achieve a reasonable computational overhead–accuracy trade-off, it is efficient to consider only the inter-neural information transfer of the neuron pairs between the last two fully connected layers. The TE acts as a smoothing factor, generating stability and becoming active only periodically, not after processing each input sample. Therefore, we can consider the TE is in our model a slowly changing meta-parameter.

Comments

This article was originally published Open Access in Entropy. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Journal

Entropy

Rights

© 2021 by the authors.

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