An Approach to Tuning Hyperparameters in Parallel: An Approach to Tuning Hyperparameters in Parallel

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2019-01-01

Department

Mathematics and Statistics

Program

Mathematics and Statistics

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

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Abstract

Predicting violent storms and dangerous weather conditions, for instance predicting tornados, is an important application for public safety. Using numerical weather simulations to classify a weather pattern as tornadic or not tornadic can take a long time due to the immense complexity associated with current models. Machine learning has the potential to classify tornadic weather patterns much more quickly, since a trained model can classify a storm in seconds when provided data. This allows for alerts to be issued more rapidly such that there is more time for the public to respond to the alert. Preprocessing methods must be applied to the natural data prior to training to prevent inaccuracies. Neural networks must have an equal balance of all classifiable cases for accurate prediction of each case. Different data augmentation approaches have been proposed to fix data imbalances. With our specialized HPC enabled framework, we examine the wall time difference of live data augmentation method versus the use of preaugmented data, when used with a convolutional neural network under various hyperparameter configurations. We also compare CPU and GPU based training over varying sizes of augmented data sets. Then we examine the wall time impact associated with varying the number of GPUs used for training a convolutional neural network. Finally, we create a new data augmentation system by implementing a generative adversarial network and qualitatively compare its output to natural data.