Neural Networks: Tricks of the Trade

It is our belief that researchers and practitioners acquire, through experience and word-of-mouth, techniques and heuristics that help them successfully apply neural networks to di cult real world problems. Often these \tricks" are theo- tically well motivated. Sometimes they are the result of trial and error. However, their most common link is that they are usually hidden in people’s heads or in the back pages of space-constrained conference papers. As a result newcomers to the eld waste much time wondering why their networks train so slowly and perform so poorly. This book is an outgrowth of a 1996 NIPS workshop called Tricks of the Trade whose goal was to begin the process of gathering and documenting these tricks. The interest that the workshop generated motivated us to expand our collection and compile it into this book. Although we have no doubt that there are many tricks we have missed, we hope that what we have included will prove to be useful, particularly to those who are relatively new to the eld. Each chapter contains one or more tricks presented by a given author (or authors). We have attempted to group related chapters into sections, though we recognize that the di erent sections are far from disjoint. Some of the chapters (e.g., 1, 13, 17) contain entire systems of tricks that are far more general than the category they have been placed in.