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Correlation between entropy and generalizability in a neural network

Statistical Mechanics 2022-07-06 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Although neural networks can solve very complex machine-learning problems, the theoretical reason for their generalizability is still not fully understood. Here we use Wang-Landau Mote Carlo algorithm to calculate the entropy (logarithm of the volume of a part of the parameter space) at a given test accuracy, and a given training loss function value or training accuracy. Our results show that entropical forces help generalizability. Although our study is on a very simple application of neural networks (a spiral dataset and a small, fully-connected neural network), our approach should be useful in explaining the generalizability of more complicated neural networks in future works.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.01996,
  title  = {Correlation between entropy and generalizability in a neural network},
  author = {Ge Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.01996},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T12:14:25.144Z