Evaluating Population Based Training on Small Datasets

Recently, there has been an increased interest in using artificial neural networks in the severely resource-constrained devices found in Internet-of-Things networks, in order to perform actions learned from the raw sensor data gathered by these devices. Unfortunately, training neural networks to achieve optimal prediction accuracy requires tuning multiple hyper-parameters, a process which has traditionally taken many times the computation time of a single training run of the neural network. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the Population Based Training algorithm, a method which simultaneously both trains and tunes a neural network, on datasets of similar size to what we might encounter in an IoT scenario. We determine that the population based training algorithm achieves prediction accuracy comparable to a traditional grid or random search on small datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art results for the Biodeg dataset.