Online Deep Learning: Growing RBM on the fly

We propose a novel online learning algorithm for Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), namely, the Online Generative Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine (OGD-RBM), that provides the ability to build and adapt the network architecture of RBM according to the statistics of streaming data. The OGD-RBM is trained in two phases: (1) an online generative phase for unsupervised feature representation at the hidden layer and (2) a discriminative phase for classification. The online generative training begins with zero neurons in the hidden layer, adds and updates the neurons to adapt to statistics of streaming data in a single pass unsupervised manner, resulting in a feature representation best suited to the data. The discriminative phase is based on stochastic gradient descent and associates the represented features to the class labels. We demonstrate the OGD-RBM on a set of multi-category and binary classification problems for data sets having varying degrees of class-imbalance. We first apply the OGD-RBM algorithm on the multi-class MNIST dataset to characterize the network evolution. We demonstrate that the online generative phase converges to a stable, concise network architecture, wherein individual neurons are inherently discriminative to the class labels despite unsupervised training. We then benchmark OGD-RBM performance to other machine learning, neural network and ClassRBM techniques for credit scoring applications using 3 public non-stationary two-class credit datasets with varying degrees of class-imbalance. We report that OGD-RBM improves accuracy by 2.5-3% over batch learning techniques while requiring at least 24%-70% fewer neurons and fewer training samples. This online generative training approach can be extended greedily to multiple layers for training Deep Belief Networks in non-stationary data mining applications without the need for a priori fixed architectures.