Hyper-parameter optimization of convolutional neural network based on particle swarm optimization algorithm

Deep neural networks have accomplished enormous progress in tackling many problems. More specifically, convolutional neural network (CNN) is a category of deep networks that have been a dominant technique in computer vision tasks. Despite that these deep neural networks are highly effective; the ideal structure is still an issue that needs a lot of investigation. Deep Convolutional Neural Network model is usually designed manually by trials and repeated tests which enormously constrain its application. Many hyper-parameters of the CNN can affect the model performance. These parameters are depth of the network, numbers of convolutional layers, and numbers of kernels with their sizes. Therefore, it may be a huge challenge to design an appropriate CNN model that uses optimized hyper-parameters and reduces the reliance on manual involvement and domain expertise. In this paper, a design architecture method for CNNs is proposed by utilization of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to learn the optimal CNN hyper-parameters values. In the experiment, we used Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) database of handwritten digit recognition. The experiments showed that our proposed approach can find an architecture that is competitive to the state-of-the-art models with a testing error of 0.87%.