A New Concept of Multiple Neural Networks Structure Using Convex Combination

In this article, a new concept of convex-combined multiple neural networks (NNs) structure is proposed. This new approach uses the collective information from multiple NNs to train the model. Based on both theoretical and experimental analyses, the new approach is shown to achieve faster training convergence with a similar or even better test accuracy than a conventional NN structure. Two experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of our new structure: the first one is a semantic frame parsing task for spoken language understanding (SLU) on the Airline Travel Information System (ATIS) data set and the other is a handwritten digit recognition task on the Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) data set. We test this new structure using both the recurrent NN and convolutional NNs through these two tasks. The results of both experiments demonstrate a 4× - 8× faster training speed with better or similar performance by using this new concept.