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MLP Regressor#

A multilayer feed-forward neural network with a continuous output layer suitable for regression problems. The Multilayer Perceptron regressor is able to handle complex non-linear regression problems by forming higher-order representations of the input features using intermediate user-defined hidden layers. The MLP also has network snapshotting and progress monitoring to ensure that the model achieves the highest validation score per a given training time budget.

Note

If there are not enough training samples to build an internal validation set with the user-specified holdout ratio then progress monitoring will be disabled.

Interfaces: Estimator, Learner, Online, Verbose, Persistable

Data Type Compatibility: Continuous

Parameters#

# Name Default Type Description
1 hidden array An array composing the user-specified hidden layers of the network in order.
2 batchSize 128 int The number of training samples to process at a time.
3 optimizer Adam Optimizer The gradient descent optimizer used to update the network parameters.
4 alpha 1e-4 float The amount of L2 regularization applied to the weights of the output layer.
5 epochs 1000 int The maximum number of training epochs. i.e. the number of times to iterate over the entire training set before terminating.
6 minChange 1e-4 float The minimum change in the training loss necessary to continue training.
7 window 3 int The number of epochs without improvement in the validation score to wait before considering an early stop.
8 holdOut 0.1 float The proportion of training samples to use for progress monitoring.
9 costFn LeastSquares RegressionLoss The function that computes the loss associated with an erroneous activation during training.
10 metric RMSE Metric The metric used to score the generalization performance of the model during training.

Example#

use Rubix\ML\Regressors\MLPRegressor;
use Rubix\ML\NeuralNet\CostFunctions\LeastSquares;
use Rubix\ML\NeuralNet\Layers\Dense;
use Rubix\ML\NeuralNet\Layers\Activation;
use Rubix\ML\NeuralNet\ActivationFunctions\ReLU;
use Rubix\ML\NeuralNet\Optimizers\RMSProp;
use Rubix\ML\CrossValidation\Metrics\RSquared;

$estimator = new MLPRegressor([
    new Dense(100),
    new Activation(new ReLU()),
    new Dense(100),
    new Activation(new ReLU()),
    new Dense(50),
    new Activation(new ReLU()),
    new Dense(50),
    new Activation(new ReLU()),
], 128, new RMSProp(0.001), 1e-3, 100, 1e-5, 3, 0.1, new LeastSquares(), new RSquared());

Additional Methods#

Return an iterable progress table with the steps from the last training session:

public steps() : iterable

use Rubix\ML\Extractors\CSV;

$extractor = new CSV('progress.csv', true);

$extractor->export($estimator->steps());

Return the validation score for each epoch from the last training session:

public scores() : float[]|null

Return the loss for each epoch from the last training session:

public losses() : float[]|null

Returns the underlying neural network instance or null if untrained:

public network() : Network|null

References#


  1. G. E. Hinton. (1989). Connectionist learning procedures. 

  2. L. Prechelt. (1997). Early Stopping - but when? 


Last update: 2021-05-08