Performance Evaluation of Loss Functions and Composition Methods of Log-scale Train Data for Supervised Learning of Neural Network

- The analysis of engineering data using neural network based on supervised learning has been utilized in various engineering fields such as optimization of chemical engineering process, concentration prediction of particulate matter pollution, prediction of thermodynamic phase equilibria, and prediction of physical properties for transport phenomena system. The supervised learning requires training data, and the performance of the supervised learning is affected by the composition and the configurations of the given training data. Among the frequently observed engineering data, the data is given in log-scale such as length of DNA, concentration of analytes, etc. In this study, for widely distributed log-scaled training data of virtual 100x100 images, available loss functions were quantitatively evaluated in terms of (i) confusion matrix, (ii) maximum relative error and (iii) mean relative error. As a result, the loss functions of mean-absolute-percentage-error and mean-squared-logarithmic-error were the optimal functions for the log scaled training data. Furthermore, we figured out that uniformly selected training data lead to the best prediction performance. The optimal loss functions and method for how to compose training data studied in this work would be applied to engineering problems such as evaluating DNA length, analyzing biomolecules, predicting concentration of colloidal suspension.