neural network validation accuracy doesn't change sometimes

Question

I am using a neural network for a binary classification problem but I am running into some trouble. Sometimes when running my model, my validation accuracy doesn't change at all and sometimes it works just fine. My dataset has 1200 samples with 28 features and I have a class imbalance (200 class a 1000 class b).All my features are normalized and are between 1 and 0. As I stated before this problem doesn't always happen but I want to know why and fix it

I have tried changing the optimisation function and the activation function but that did me no good. I have also noticed that when I increased the number of neurons in my network this problem occurs less often but it wasn't fixed.I also tried increasing the number of epochs but the problem keeps occuring sometimes

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(28, input_dim=28,kernel_initializer='normal', activation='sigmoid'))
model.add(Dense(200, kernel_initializer='normal',activation='sigmoid')) 
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(300, kernel_initializer='normal',activation='sigmoid')) 
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(300, kernel_initializer='normal',activation='sigmoid')) 
model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(150, kernel_initializer='normal',activation='sigmoid')) 
model.add(Dropout(0.4))
model.add(Dense(1,kernel_initializer='normal'))
model.compile(optimizer='adam',loss='binary_crossentropy',metrics=['accuracy'])
history = model.fit(X_train, y_train,
                    epochs=34,
                    batch_size=32,
                    validation_data=(X_val, y_val),
                    verbose=1)

This is the result I get sometimes from training my model

Epoch 1/34
788/788 [==============================] - 1s 2ms/step - loss: 1.5705 - acc: 0.6865 - val_loss: 0.6346 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 2/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 211us/step - loss: 1.0262 - acc: 0.6231 - val_loss: 0.5310 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 3/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 194us/step - loss: 1.7575 - acc: 0.7221 - val_loss: 0.5431 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 4/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 218us/step - loss: 0.9113 - acc: 0.5774 - val_loss: 0.5685 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 5/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 199us/step - loss: 1.0987 - acc: 0.6688 - val_loss: 0.6435 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 6/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 201us/step - loss: 0.9777 - acc: 0.5343 - val_loss: 0.5643 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 7/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 204us/step - loss: 1.0603 - acc: 0.5914 - val_loss: 0.6266 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 8/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 197us/step - loss: 0.7580 - acc: 0.5939 - val_loss: 0.6615 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 9/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 206us/step - loss: 0.8950 - acc: 0.6650 - val_loss: 0.5291 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 10/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 230us/step - loss: 0.8114 - acc: 0.6701 - val_loss: 0.5428 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 11/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 281us/step - loss: 0.7235 - acc: 0.6624 - val_loss: 0.5275 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 12/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 264us/step - loss: 0.7237 - acc: 0.6485 - val_loss: 0.5473 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 13/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 213us/step - loss: 0.6902 - acc: 0.7056 - val_loss: 0.5265 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 14/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 217us/step - loss: 0.6726 - acc: 0.7145 - val_loss: 0.5285 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 15/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 197us/step - loss: 0.6656 - acc: 0.7132 - val_loss: 0.5354 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 16/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 216us/step - loss: 0.6083 - acc: 0.7259 - val_loss: 0.5262 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 17/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 218us/step - loss: 0.6188 - acc: 0.7310 - val_loss: 0.5271 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 18/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 210us/step - loss: 0.6642 - acc: 0.6142 - val_loss: 0.5676 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 19/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 200us/step - loss: 0.6017 - acc: 0.7221 - val_loss: 0.5256 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 20/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 209us/step - loss: 0.6188 - acc: 0.7157 - val_loss: 0.8090 - val_acc: 0.2217
Epoch 21/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 201us/step - loss: 1.1724 - acc: 0.4061 - val_loss: 0.5448 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 22/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 205us/step - loss: 0.5724 - acc: 0.7424 - val_loss: 0.5293 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 23/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 234us/step - loss: 0.5829 - acc: 0.7538 - val_loss: 0.5274 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 24/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 209us/step - loss: 0.5815 - acc: 0.7525 - val_loss: 0.5274 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 25/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 220us/step - loss: 0.5688 - acc: 0.7576 - val_loss: 0.5274 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 26/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 210us/step - loss: 0.5715 - acc: 0.7525 - val_loss: 0.5273 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 27/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 206us/step - loss: 0.5584 - acc: 0.7576 - val_loss: 0.5274 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 28/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 215us/step - loss: 0.5728 - acc: 0.7563 - val_loss: 0.5272 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 29/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 281us/step - loss: 0.5735 - acc: 0.7576 - val_loss: 0.5275 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 30/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 272us/step - loss: 0.5773 - acc: 0.7614 - val_loss: 0.5272 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 31/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 225us/step - loss: 0.5847 - acc: 0.7525 - val_loss: 0.5272 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 32/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 239us/step - loss: 0.5739 - acc: 0.7551 - val_loss: 0.5272 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 33/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 216us/step - loss: 0.5632 - acc: 0.7525 - val_loss: 0.5269 - val_acc: 0.7783
Epoch 34/34
788/788 [==============================] - 0s 240us/step - loss: 0.5672 - acc: 0.7576 - val_loss: 0.5267 - val_acc: 0.7783

desertnaut · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-08T15:37:44.830

Given your reported class imbalance, your model does not seem to learn anything (the reported accuracy seems consistent with just predicting everything as the majority class). Nevertheless, there are issues with your code; for starters:

Replace all activation functions except for the output layer to activation = 'relu'.
Add a sigmoid activation function to your last layer activation='sigmoid'; as is, yours is a regression network (default linear output in the last layer) and not a classification one.
Remove all kernel_initializer='normal' arguments from all your layers, i.e. leave it to the default one kernel_initializer='glorot_uniform', which is known to achieve (much) better performance.

Also, not clear why you go for an input dense layer of 28 units - no. of units here has nothing to do with the input dimension; please see Keras Sequential model input layer.

Dropout should not go into the network by default - try first without it and then add if necessary.

All in all, here is how your model should look for starters:

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(200, input_dim=28, activation='relu')) 
# model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(300, activation='relu')) 
# model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(300, activation='relu')) 
# model.add(Dropout(0.5))
model.add(Dense(150, activation='relu')) 
# model.add(Dropout(0.4))
model.add(Dense(1, activation='sigmoid'))

model.compile(optimizer='adam',loss='binary_crossentropy',metrics=['accuracy'])

and, as said, uncomment/adjust the dropout layers depending on your experimental results.

neural network validation accuracy doesn't change sometimes

1 Answers1