I’m tackling an interesting machine learning problem and would love to hear if anyone knows a good algorithm to deal with the following:
- The algorithm must learn to approximate a function of N inputs and M outputs
- N is quite large, e.g. 1,000-10,000
- M is quite small, e.g. 5-10
- All inputs and outputs are floating point values, could be positive or negative, likely to be relatively small in absolute value but no absolute guarantees on bounds
- Each time period I get N inputs and need to predict the M outputs, at the end of the time period the actual values for the M outputs are provided (i.e. this is a supervised learning situation where learning needs to take place online)
- The underlying function is non-linear, but not too nasty (e.g. I expect it will be smooth and continuous over most of the input space)
- There will be a small amount of noise in the function, but signal/noise is likely to be good – I expect the N inputs will expain 95%+ of the output values
- The underlying function is slowly changing over time – unlikely to change drastically in a single time period but is likely to shift slightly over the 1000s of time periods range
- There is no hidden state to worry about (other than the changing function), i.e. all the information required is in the N inputs
I’m currently thinking some kind of back-propagation neural network with lots of hidden nodes might work – but is that really the best approach for this situation and will it handle the changing function?
With your number of inputs and outputs, I’d also go for a neural network, it should do a good approximation. The slight change is good for a back-propagation technique, it should not have to ‘de-learn’ stuff.