Hi all,

I was hoping we could discuss the plot below:

https://imgur.com/TMK9RgD

That plot comes from a parameter search using Keras/Tensorflow for a binary classification problem with an unbalanced class distribution (as you can tell from the acc plot, the ratio is about 5:1 negative to positive).

The metric that I am most interested in is Precision, and as you can see in this example it is very unstable, bouncing around wildly between epochs – which obviously doesn’t lend itself to being a good/stable model.

Whilst there is a little overfitting, there doesn’t seem to be too much and I can confirm that the data itself is all properly scaled and normalised.

Although the plot scale is a bit large (sorry) to tell properly, I think what we’d find is that Recall fluctuates in unison with Precision. As Recall bounces upwards, I’d expect Precision to take a dive downwards.

I can’t post the exact model because it’s a parameter search with a wide range of possible configurations, but I’m optimising across a range of network depths, widths, dropouts, shapes, learning rate, etc. I’m using binary_crossentropy as the loss, Elu activations, and Nadam optimizer – though I’ve tried a various others with similar results.

What would be your suggestions for creating a more stable model?

At the moment, the class_weight is set to 0:1, 1:1. I think upping the positive class ratio would somewhat stabilise the model (by increasing recall), but I’m shooting to have a high precision and accepting that my recall will be the trade-off and be somewhat low. For example, I’d be happy with 57% precision at 5% recall. In fact – that’s the exact result I got from a previous parameter search, but it didn’t generalise well to the blind test set, and I’m suspecting that the cause was the unstable epoch-to-epoch precision we’re seeing in this plot (though I can only see the plots for the “current” model being generated, so by the end of the many-hour parameter search all I have is a csv of the final values, with no plots to go along with them).