Consistent feature selection for neural networks via Adaptive Group Lasso

Abstract: One main obstacle for the wide use of deep learning in medical and engineering sciences is its interpretability. While neural network models are strong tools for making predictions, they often provide little information about which features play significant roles in influencing the prediction accuracy. To overcome this issue, many regularization procedures for learning with neural networks have been proposed for dropping non-significant features. Unfortunately, the lack of theoretical results casts doubt on the applicability of such pipelines. In this work, we propose and establish a theoretical guarantee for the use of the adaptive group lasso for selecting important features of neural networks. Specifically, we show that our feature selection method is consistent for single-output feed-forward neural networks with one hidden layer and hyperbolic tangent activation function. We demonstrate its applicability using both simulation and data analysis.