Effects of Hyper-parameters and Dataset on CNN Training

Abstract

The purpose of training a convolutional neural network (CNN) is to obtain weight factors that give high classification accuracies. The initial values of hyper-parameters affect the training results, and it is important to train a CNN with a suitable hyper-parameter set of a learning rate, a batch size, the initialization of weight factors, and an optimizer. We investigate the effects of a single hyper-parameter while others are fixed in order to obtain a hyper-parameter set that gives higher classification accuracies and requires shorter training time using a proposed VGG-like CNN for training since the VGG is widely used. The CNN is trained for four datasets of CIFAR10, CIFAR100, GTSRB and DSDL-DB. The effects of the normalization and the data transformation for datasets are also investigated, and a training scheme using merged datasets is proposed.