A Computationally Efficient Weight Pruning Algorithm for Artificial Neural Network Classifiers

A novel technique is being proposed to prune the weights of artificial neural networks (ANNs) while training with backpropagation algorithm. Iterative update of weights through gradient descent mechanism does not guarantee convergence in a specified number of epochs. Pruning of non-relevant weights not only reduces the computational complexity but also improves the classification performance. This algorithm first defines the relevance of initialized weights in a statistical sense by introducing a coefficient of dominance for each weight converging on a hidden node and subsequently employing the concept of complexity penalty. Based upon complexity penalty for each weight, a decision has been taken to either prune or retain the weight. It has been shown analytically that a weight with higher complexity penalty has a high degree of Fisher information which further implies its ability to capture the variations in the input set for better classification. Simulation experiments performed with five benchmark data sets reveal that ANNs trained after being pruned using the proposed technique exhibit higher convergence, lower execution time and higher success rate in the test phase and yields substantial reduction in computational resources. For complex architectures, early convergence was found to be directly correlated with percentage of weights pruned. The efficacy of the technique has been validated on several benchmark datasets having large diversity of attributes.