A Gradient Free Neural Network Framework Based on Universal Approximation Theorem

Abstract: We present a numerical scheme for computation of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) weights, which stems from the Universal Approximation Theorem, avoiding laborious iterations. The proposed algorithm adheres to the underlying theory, is highly fast, and results in remarkably low errors when applied for regression and classification of complex data-sets, such as the Griewank function of multiple variables $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^{100}$ with random noise addition, and MNIST database for handwritten digits recognition, with $7\times10^4$ images. The same mathematical formulation is found capable of approximating highly nonlinear functions in multiple dimensions, with low errors (e.g. $10^{-10}$) for the test-set of the unknown functions, their higher-order partial derivatives, as well as numerically solving Partial Differential Equations. The method is based on the calculation of the weights of each neuron in small neighborhoods of the data, such that the corresponding local approximation matrix is invertible. Accordingly, optimization of hyperparameters is not necessary, as the number of neurons stems directly from the dimensionality of the data, further improving the algorithmic speed. Under this setting, overfitting is inherently avoided, and the results are interpretable and reproducible. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is of class P with $\mathcal{O}(mn^2)+\mathcal{O}(\frac{m^3}{n^2})-\mathcal{O}(\log(n+1))$ computing time, with respect to the observations $m$ and features $n$, in contrast with the NP-Complete class of standard algorithms for ANN training. The performance of the method is high, irrespective of the size of the dataset, and the test-set errors are similar or smaller than the training errors, indicating the generalization efficiency of the algorithm.