A Bootstrap Algorithm for Fast Supervised Learning

Abstract

Training a neural network (NN) typically relies on some type of curve-following method, such as gradient descent (GD) (and stochastic gradient descent (SGD)), ADADELTA, ADAM or limited memory algorithms. Convergence for these algorithms usually relies on having access to a large quantity of observations in order to achieve a high level of accuracy and, with certain classes of functions, these algorithms could take multiple epochs of data points to catch on. Herein, a different technique with the potential of achieving dramatically better speeds of convergence, especially for shallow networks, is explored: it does not curve-follow but rather relies on 'decoupling' hidden layers and on updating their weighted connections through bootstrapping, resampling and linear regression. By utilizing resampled observations, the convergence of this process is empirically shown to be remarkably fast and to require a lower amount of data points: in particular, our experiments show that one needs a fraction of the observations that are required with traditional neural network training methods to approximate various classes of functions.