The Epoch Interpretation of Learning

In this paper we propose a simple, alternative interpretation of backpropagation learning. We call this the “epoch interpretation of learning” and show how it can be used to improve the performance of earlystopping based techniques used for improving generalization performance in neural networks. Experiments performed on noisy, non-linear foreign exchange rate data demonstrate that networks built using an early-stopping technique that uses the epoch interpretation of learning on average out-perform networks built using a conventional early-stopping technique by 11%.