ForwardThinking

Companion code for Forward Thinking: Building and Training Neural Networks One Layer at a Time and Forward Thinking: Building Deep Random Forests submitted to NIPS 2017.

Authors:

• Chris Hettinger
• Tanner Christensen
• Ben Ehlert
• Jeffrey Humpherys
• Tyler Jarvis
• David Kartchner
• Kevin Miller
• Sean Wade

Publications

• Forward Thinking: Building and Training Neural Networks One Layer at a Time: (URL coming soon)
• Forward Thinking: Building Deep Random Forests: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07366

Dependencies

• numpy==1.11.3
• tensorflow-gpu==1.0.0
• keras==2.0.4
• matplotlib==2.0.0

Hardware

We used a single desktop computer with:

• Intel i5-7400 processor
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB GPU
• 8GB DDR4 RAM With our configuration, it took approximately 2 hours to run the run_mnist_cnn.sh script.

Installation

TODO: Make this pip installable.

Execution

Once the package has been installed, you may run the included run_mnist_cnn.sh script.

This will run the forward thinking neural network (achieved 99.72% in our tests), the backpropagation equivalent of our model (achieved 99.63% in our tests), and saves and displays a plot comparing the test and train accuracies.