Autonomous CNN (AutoCNN): A data-driven approach to network architecture determination

Designing a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is a complex task and requires expert knowledge to optimize the performance and network architecture. In this paper, a novel data-driven approach is proposed to determine the architecture of CNN models. The proposed Autonomous Convolutional Neural Networks (AutoCNNThe executable code and original numerical results can be downloaded from (https://tinyurl.com/AutoCNN)) algorithm introduces data driven strategies for addition of new convolutional layers, pruning of redundant filters and training cycle optimization. AutoCNN is evaluated using MNIST, MNIST-rot-back-image, Fashion MNIST and the ADHD200 datasets to measure the performance on small datasets with varied feature distributions. The results indicate that AutoCNN optimizes the CNN network architecture and helps maximise the classification performance. The data-driven network determination approach introduced in this paper was found to not only provides competitive performance similar to existing evolutionary computation based network determination algorithms in literature, but was found to be an effective optimization tool to improve the performance of existing CNN architectures. Further, the AutoCNN was found to highly immune to noise in the dataset and has proven to be effective method to transfer knowledge between related datasets. Therefore, the AutoCNN is a highly versatile CNN architecture determination tool that has a wide range of applications in the field of autonomous driving, medical image analysis, image enhancement, camera based security monitoring and image based fault detection.