English

Dropout as data augmentation

Machine Learning 2016-01-11 v4 Machine Learning

Abstract

Dropout is typically interpreted as bagging a large number of models sharing parameters. We show that using dropout in a network can also be interpreted as a kind of data augmentation in the input space without domain knowledge. We present an approach to projecting the dropout noise within a network back into the input space, thereby generating augmented versions of the training data, and we show that training a deterministic network on the augmented samples yields similar results. Finally, we propose a new dropout noise scheme based on our observations and show that it improves dropout results without adding significant computational cost.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.08700,
  title  = {Dropout as data augmentation},
  author = {Xavier Bouthillier and Kishore Konda and Pascal Vincent and Roland Memisevic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.08700},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:02:16.906Z