Bioinspired parameter tuning of mlp networks for gene expression analysis: Quality of fitness estimates vs. number of solutions analysed

Abstract

The values selected for the free parameters of Artificial Neural Networks usually have a high impact on their performance. As a result, several works investigate the use of optimization techniques, mainly metaheuristics, for the selection of values related to the network architecture, like number of hidden neurons, number of hidden layers, activation function, and to the learning algorithm, like learning rate, momentum coefficient, etc. A large number of these works use Genetic Algorithms for parameter optimization. Lately, other bioinspired optimization techniques, like Ant Colony optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization, among others, have been successfully used. Although bioinspired optimization techniques have been successfully adopted to tune neural networks parameter values, little is known about the relation between the quality of the estimates of the fitness of a solution used during the search process and the quality of the solution obtained by the optimization method. In this paper, we describe an empirical study on this issue. To focus our analysis, we restricted the datasets to the domain of gene expression analysis. Our results indicate that, although the computational power saved by using simpler estimation methods can be used to increase the number of solutions tested in the search process, the use of accurate estimates to guide that search is the most important factor to obtain good solutions. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.