Optimal Brain Surgeon: Extensions and performance comparisons

We extend Optimal Brain Surgeon (OBS) - a second-order method for pruning networks - to allow for general error measures, and explore a reduced computational and storage implementation via a dominant eigenspace decomposition. Simulations on nonlinear, noisy pattern classification problems reveal that OBS does lead to improved generalization, and performs favorably in comparison with Optimal Brain Damage (OBD). We find that the required retraining steps in OBD may lead to inferior generalization, that can be interpreted as due to injecting noise backa result the system. A common technique is to stop training of a largeinto at the minimum validation error. We found that the testnetwork error could be reduced even further by means of OBS (but not OBD) pruning.