Research on the Classification Ability of Deep Belief Networks on Small and Medium Datasets

Recent theoretical advances in the learning of deep artificial neural networks have made it possible to overcome a vanishing gradient problem. This limitation has been overcome using a pre-training step, where deep belief networks formed by the stacked Restricted Boltzmann Machines perform unsupervised learning. Once a pre-training step is done, network weights are fine-tuned using regular error back propagation while treating network as a feed-forward net. In the current paper we perform the comparison of described approach and commonly used classification approaches on some well-known classification data sets from the UCI repository as well as on one mid-sized proprietary data set.