Deep Convex Networks for Image and Speech Classification

  • Li Deng ,
  • Dong Yu

Deep Learning Workshop at 2011 International Conf. Machine Learning |

To overcome the scalability challenge associated with Deep Belief Network (DBN), we have designed a novel deep learning architecture, deep convex network (DCN). The learning problem in DCN is convex within each layer. Additional structure-exploited fine tuning further improves the quality of DCN. The full learning in DCN is batch-mode based instead of stochastic, naturally lending it amenable to parallel training that can be distributed over many machines. Experimental results on handwriting image recognition task (MNIST) and on phone state classification (TIMIT) demonstrate superior performance of DCN over DBN not only in training efficiency but also in classification accuracy. DCN gives the error rate of 0.83%, the lowest without the use of additional training data produced by elastic distortion. The corresponding error rate by the best DBN which we have carefully tuned is 1.06%. On the TIMIT task, DCN also outperforms DBN but with a relatively smaller percentage.