Topology-based representative datasets to reduce neural network training resources

One of the main drawbacks of the practical use of neural networks is the long time required in the training process. Such a training process consists of an iterative change of parameters trying to minimize a loss function. These changes are driven by a dataset, which can be seen as a set of labeled points in an n-dimensional space. In this paper, we explore the concept of a representative dataset which is a dataset smaller than the original one, satisfying a nearness condition independent of isometric transformations. Representativeness is measured using persistence diagrams (a computational topology tool) due to its computational efficiency. We theoretically prove that the accuracy of a perceptron evaluated on the original dataset coincides with the accuracy of the neural network evaluated on the representative dataset when the neural network architecture is a perceptron, the loss function is the mean squared error, and certain conditions on the representativeness of the dataset are imposed. These theoretical results accompanied by experimentation open a door to reducing the size of the dataset to gain time in the training process of any neural network.