Novel Pruning of Dendritic Neuron Models for Improved System Implementation and Performance

Pruning is widely used for neural network model compression. It removes redundant links from a weight tensor to lead to smaller and more efficient neural networks for system implementation. A compressed neural network can enable faster run and reduced computational cost in network training. In this paper, a novel pruning method is proposed for a dendritic neuron model (DNM). It calculates the significance of each DNM dendrite. The calculated significance is expressed numerically and a dendrite whose significance is lower than a pre-set threshold is removed. Experimental results verify that it obtains superior performance over the existing one in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.