Improving Convolutional Neural Network Design via Variable Neighborhood Search

An unsupervised method for convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture design is proposed. The method relies on a variable neighborhood search-based approach for finding CNN architectures and hyperparameter values that improve classification performance. For this purpose, t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is applied to effectively represent the solution space in 2D. Then, k-Means clustering divides this representation space having in account the relative distance between neighbors. The algorithm is tested in the CIFAR-10 image dataset. The obtained solution improves the CNN validation loss by over \(15\%\) and the respective accuracy by \(5\%\). Moreover, the network shows higher predictive power and robustness, validating our method for the optimization of CNN design.