What activation function should I use for a specific regression problem?












1












$begingroup$


Which is better for regression problems create a neural net with tanh/sigmoid and exp(like) activations or ReLU and linear? Standard is to use ReLU but it's brute force solution that requires certain net size and I would like to avoid creating a very big net, also sigmoid is much more prefered but in my case regression will output values from range (0, 1e7)... maybe also sigmoid net with linear head will work? I am curious about your take on the subject.






machine-learning neural-network deep-learning regression activation-function







share|improve this question











$endgroup$

















    1












    $begingroup$


    Which is better for regression problems create a neural net with tanh/sigmoid and exp(like) activations or ReLU and linear? Standard is to use ReLU but it's brute force solution that requires certain net size and I would like to avoid creating a very big net, also sigmoid is much more prefered but in my case regression will output values from range (0, 1e7)... maybe also sigmoid net with linear head will work? I am curious about your take on the subject.






    machine-learning neural-network deep-learning regression activation-function







    share|improve this question











    $endgroup$















      1












      1








      1





      $begingroup$


      Which is better for regression problems create a neural net with tanh/sigmoid and exp(like) activations or ReLU and linear? Standard is to use ReLU but it's brute force solution that requires certain net size and I would like to avoid creating a very big net, also sigmoid is much more prefered but in my case regression will output values from range (0, 1e7)... maybe also sigmoid net with linear head will work? I am curious about your take on the subject.






      machine-learning neural-network deep-learning regression activation-function







      share|improve this question











      $endgroup$




      Which is better for regression problems create a neural net with tanh/sigmoid and exp(like) activations or ReLU and linear? Standard is to use ReLU but it's brute force solution that requires certain net size and I would like to avoid creating a very big net, also sigmoid is much more prefered but in my case regression will output values from range (0, 1e7)... maybe also sigmoid net with linear head will work? I am curious about your take on the subject.






      machine-learning neural-network deep-learning regression activation-function




      machine-learning neural-network deep-learning regression activation-function






      share|improve this question















      share|improve this question













      share|improve this question




      share|improve this question








      edited 9 hours ago









      Media

      7,36762161




      7,36762161










      asked 12 hours ago









      questerquester

      313




      313






















          2 Answers
          2






          active

          oldest

          votes


















          1












          $begingroup$

          The issue with sigmoid and tanh activations is that their gradients saturate for extreme values of their arguments. This may occur if you do not normalize your inputs. If the learned weights of the unit are such that the gradient of its activation is close to zero, it will take longer for any updates to be reflected in the unit's weights. A final layer with no non-linearity will help you scale up your hidden layers' outputs.



          In the end, the performance is application specific. You should try out both kinds of activations on a subset of your data and see which performs better.



          Credit: https://medium.com/@krishnakalyan3/introduction-to-exponential-linear-unit-d3e2904b366c






          share|improve this answer









          $endgroup$





















            0












            $begingroup$

            There are two points that have to be considered.




            1. Take care of the output of your network. If that's a Real number and can take any value, you have to use linear activation as the output.

            2. The inner activations highly depend on your task and the size of the network that you use. What I'm going to tell you is based on experience. If you don't have a very deep network, $tanh$ and $ReLU$ may not differ very much in convergence time. If you're using very deep networks, don't use $tahn$ at all. $ReLU$ is also not recommended in some contexts. You can employ $PReLU$ in very deep networks. It does not add too many parameters to learn. You can also use $leaky-ReLU$ in order to avoid dying ReLU problem which may occur.


            Finally, about the other nonlinearity that you've referred; try not to use $Sigmoid$ due to that fact that it's expected value is not equal to zero but half. It's a bit statistical stuff, but you can consider it's roughly hard for a network to learn shifted weights.






            share|improve this answer











            $endgroup$













              Your Answer





              StackExchange.ifUsing("editor", function () {
              return StackExchange.using("mathjaxEditing", function () {
              StackExchange.MarkdownEditor.creationCallbacks.add(function (editor, postfix) {
              StackExchange.mathjaxEditing.prepareWmdForMathJax(editor, postfix, [["$", "$"], ["\\(","\\)"]]);
              });
              });
              }, "mathjax-editing");

              StackExchange.ready(function() {
              var channelOptions = {
              tags: "".split(" "),
              id: "557"
              };
              initTagRenderer("".split(" "), "".split(" "), channelOptions);

              StackExchange.using("externalEditor", function() {
              // Have to fire editor after snippets, if snippets enabled
              if (StackExchange.settings.snippets.snippetsEnabled) {
              StackExchange.using("snippets", function() {
              createEditor();
              });
              }
              else {
              createEditor();
              }
              });

              function createEditor() {
              StackExchange.prepareEditor({
              heartbeatType: 'answer',
              autoActivateHeartbeat: false,
              convertImagesToLinks: false,
              noModals: true,
              showLowRepImageUploadWarning: true,
              reputationToPostImages: null,
              bindNavPrevention: true,
              postfix: "",
              imageUploader: {
              brandingHtml: "Powered by u003ca class="icon-imgur-white" href="https://imgur.com/"u003eu003c/au003e",
              contentPolicyHtml: "User contributions licensed under u003ca href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"u003ecc by-sa 3.0 with attribution requiredu003c/au003e u003ca href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/content-policy"u003e(content policy)u003c/au003e",
              allowUrls: true
              },
              onDemand: true,
              discardSelector: ".discard-answer"
              ,immediatelyShowMarkdownHelp:true
              });


              }
              });














              draft saved

              draft discarded


















              StackExchange.ready(
              function () {
              StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2fdatascience.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f47751%2fwhat-activation-function-should-i-use-for-a-specific-regression-problem%23new-answer', 'question_page');
              }
              );

              Post as a guest















              Required, but never shown

























              2 Answers
              2






              active

              oldest

              votes








              2 Answers
              2






              active

              oldest

              votes









              active

              oldest

              votes






              active

              oldest

              votes









              1












              $begingroup$

              The issue with sigmoid and tanh activations is that their gradients saturate for extreme values of their arguments. This may occur if you do not normalize your inputs. If the learned weights of the unit are such that the gradient of its activation is close to zero, it will take longer for any updates to be reflected in the unit's weights. A final layer with no non-linearity will help you scale up your hidden layers' outputs.



              In the end, the performance is application specific. You should try out both kinds of activations on a subset of your data and see which performs better.



              Credit: https://medium.com/@krishnakalyan3/introduction-to-exponential-linear-unit-d3e2904b366c






              share|improve this answer









              $endgroup$


















                1












                $begingroup$

                The issue with sigmoid and tanh activations is that their gradients saturate for extreme values of their arguments. This may occur if you do not normalize your inputs. If the learned weights of the unit are such that the gradient of its activation is close to zero, it will take longer for any updates to be reflected in the unit's weights. A final layer with no non-linearity will help you scale up your hidden layers' outputs.



                In the end, the performance is application specific. You should try out both kinds of activations on a subset of your data and see which performs better.



                Credit: https://medium.com/@krishnakalyan3/introduction-to-exponential-linear-unit-d3e2904b366c






                share|improve this answer









                $endgroup$
















                  1












                  1








                  1





                  $begingroup$

                  The issue with sigmoid and tanh activations is that their gradients saturate for extreme values of their arguments. This may occur if you do not normalize your inputs. If the learned weights of the unit are such that the gradient of its activation is close to zero, it will take longer for any updates to be reflected in the unit's weights. A final layer with no non-linearity will help you scale up your hidden layers' outputs.



                  In the end, the performance is application specific. You should try out both kinds of activations on a subset of your data and see which performs better.



                  Credit: https://medium.com/@krishnakalyan3/introduction-to-exponential-linear-unit-d3e2904b366c






                  share|improve this answer









                  $endgroup$



                  The issue with sigmoid and tanh activations is that their gradients saturate for extreme values of their arguments. This may occur if you do not normalize your inputs. If the learned weights of the unit are such that the gradient of its activation is close to zero, it will take longer for any updates to be reflected in the unit's weights. A final layer with no non-linearity will help you scale up your hidden layers' outputs.



                  In the end, the performance is application specific. You should try out both kinds of activations on a subset of your data and see which performs better.



                  Credit: https://medium.com/@krishnakalyan3/introduction-to-exponential-linear-unit-d3e2904b366c







                  share|improve this answer












                  share|improve this answer



                  share|improve this answer










                  answered 12 hours ago









                  hazrmardhazrmard

                  1264




                  1264























                      0












                      $begingroup$

                      There are two points that have to be considered.




                      1. Take care of the output of your network. If that's a Real number and can take any value, you have to use linear activation as the output.

                      2. The inner activations highly depend on your task and the size of the network that you use. What I'm going to tell you is based on experience. If you don't have a very deep network, $tanh$ and $ReLU$ may not differ very much in convergence time. If you're using very deep networks, don't use $tahn$ at all. $ReLU$ is also not recommended in some contexts. You can employ $PReLU$ in very deep networks. It does not add too many parameters to learn. You can also use $leaky-ReLU$ in order to avoid dying ReLU problem which may occur.


                      Finally, about the other nonlinearity that you've referred; try not to use $Sigmoid$ due to that fact that it's expected value is not equal to zero but half. It's a bit statistical stuff, but you can consider it's roughly hard for a network to learn shifted weights.






                      share|improve this answer











                      $endgroup$


















                        0












                        $begingroup$

                        There are two points that have to be considered.




                        1. Take care of the output of your network. If that's a Real number and can take any value, you have to use linear activation as the output.

                        2. The inner activations highly depend on your task and the size of the network that you use. What I'm going to tell you is based on experience. If you don't have a very deep network, $tanh$ and $ReLU$ may not differ very much in convergence time. If you're using very deep networks, don't use $tahn$ at all. $ReLU$ is also not recommended in some contexts. You can employ $PReLU$ in very deep networks. It does not add too many parameters to learn. You can also use $leaky-ReLU$ in order to avoid dying ReLU problem which may occur.


                        Finally, about the other nonlinearity that you've referred; try not to use $Sigmoid$ due to that fact that it's expected value is not equal to zero but half. It's a bit statistical stuff, but you can consider it's roughly hard for a network to learn shifted weights.






                        share|improve this answer











                        $endgroup$
















                          0












                          0








                          0





                          $begingroup$

                          There are two points that have to be considered.




                          1. Take care of the output of your network. If that's a Real number and can take any value, you have to use linear activation as the output.

                          2. The inner activations highly depend on your task and the size of the network that you use. What I'm going to tell you is based on experience. If you don't have a very deep network, $tanh$ and $ReLU$ may not differ very much in convergence time. If you're using very deep networks, don't use $tahn$ at all. $ReLU$ is also not recommended in some contexts. You can employ $PReLU$ in very deep networks. It does not add too many parameters to learn. You can also use $leaky-ReLU$ in order to avoid dying ReLU problem which may occur.


                          Finally, about the other nonlinearity that you've referred; try not to use $Sigmoid$ due to that fact that it's expected value is not equal to zero but half. It's a bit statistical stuff, but you can consider it's roughly hard for a network to learn shifted weights.






                          share|improve this answer











                          $endgroup$



                          There are two points that have to be considered.




                          1. Take care of the output of your network. If that's a Real number and can take any value, you have to use linear activation as the output.

                          2. The inner activations highly depend on your task and the size of the network that you use. What I'm going to tell you is based on experience. If you don't have a very deep network, $tanh$ and $ReLU$ may not differ very much in convergence time. If you're using very deep networks, don't use $tahn$ at all. $ReLU$ is also not recommended in some contexts. You can employ $PReLU$ in very deep networks. It does not add too many parameters to learn. You can also use $leaky-ReLU$ in order to avoid dying ReLU problem which may occur.


                          Finally, about the other nonlinearity that you've referred; try not to use $Sigmoid$ due to that fact that it's expected value is not equal to zero but half. It's a bit statistical stuff, but you can consider it's roughly hard for a network to learn shifted weights.







                          share|improve this answer














                          share|improve this answer



                          share|improve this answer








                          edited 8 hours ago

























                          answered 9 hours ago









                          MediaMedia

                          7,36762161




                          7,36762161






























                              draft saved

                              draft discarded




















































                              Thanks for contributing an answer to Data Science Stack Exchange!


                              • Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!

                              But avoid …



                              • Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.

                              • Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.


                              Use MathJax to format equations. MathJax reference.


                              To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.




                              draft saved


                              draft discarded














                              StackExchange.ready(
                              function () {
                              StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2fdatascience.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f47751%2fwhat-activation-function-should-i-use-for-a-specific-regression-problem%23new-answer', 'question_page');
                              }
                              );

                              Post as a guest















                              Required, but never shown





















































                              Required, but never shown














                              Required, but never shown












                              Required, but never shown







                              Required, but never shown

































                              Required, but never shown














                              Required, but never shown












                              Required, but never shown







                              Required, but never shown







                              -

                              Popular posts from this blog

                              How to label and detect the document text images

                              Image
                              1 $begingroup$ This is what I mean as document text image: I want to label the texts in image as separate blocks and my model should detect these labels as classes. NOTE: This is how the end result should be like: The labels like Block 1, Block 2, Block 3,.. should be Logo, Title, Date,.. Others, etc. Work done: First approach : I tried to implement this method via Object Detection, it didn't work. It didn't even detect any text. Second approach : Then I tried it using PixelLink. As this model is build for scene text detection, it detected each and every text in the image. But this method can detect multiple lines of text if the threshold values are increased. But I have no idea how do I add labels to the text blocks. PIXEL_CLS_WEIGHT_all_ones = 'PIXEL_CLS_WEIGHT_all_ones' PIXEL_C...
                              Read more

                              Vallis Paradisi

                              Image
                              Coordinata: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap} 33°03′S 71°37′W  /  33.05°S 71.617°W  / -33.05; -71.617 Vallis Paradisi Res apud Vicidata repertae: Civitas : Chilia Numerus incolarum : 296 655 Zona horaria : UTC-4 Situs interretialis Nomen officiale : Valparaíso Gubernium Consilium : municipal council of Valparaíso Geographia Superficies : 401 600 000 Metrum quadratum Coniunctiones urbium Urbes gemellae : Ovetum , Badalona , Santa Fe , Ora longa , Sciamhaevum , Quantunia , Callao , Bat Yam , Melaka , Novorossiysk , Busan , Corduba , Odessa , Rosario , Malacca , Barcino , Soteropolis , Franciscopolis (California) , Guanajuato, Silao Tabula aut despectus Despectus in portum sinumque et urbem Vallis Paradisi Vallis Para...
                              Read more

                              Tabula Rosettana

                              Image
                              Tabula multilinguis Rosettana in Museo Britannico ostenditur. Tabula Rosettana, [1] etiam titulo OGIS 90 agnita, est stela decreto de rebus sacris in Aegypto anno 196 a.C.n. lato inscripta. Tabula iuxta Rosettam Aegypti, urbem in delta Nili et ad oram maris Mediterranei iacentem, anno 1799 a milite Francico reperta est. Inventio stelae, linguis duabus scripturisque tribus inscriptae, eruditis Instituti Aegypti statim nuntiata est; ibi enim iussu imperatoris Napoleonis eruditi omnium scientiarum (sub aegide Commissionis Scientiarum et Artium) properaverant cum expeditione Francica. Qua a Britannis mox debellata, tabula Rosettana Londinium missa hodie apud Museum Britannicum iacet. Textus Graecus cito lectus interpretationi textuum Aegyptiorum (in formis hieroglyphica et demotica expressorum) gradatim adiuvit. Denique textum plene interpretatus est Ioannes Franciscus Champollion. Ab opere eruditorum cumulativo coepit hodiernus scripturae hieroglyphicae linguaeque Aegyptiae a...
                              Read more