Bayesian Additive Regression Networks
Danielle Van Boxel
We apply Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) principles to training an
ensemble of small neural networks for regression tasks. Using Markov Chain
Monte Carlo, we sample from the posterior distribution of neural networks that
have a single hidden layer. To create an ensemble of these, we apply Gibbs
sampling to update each network against the residual target value (i.e.
subtracting the effect of the other networks). We demonstrate the effectiveness
of this technique on several benchmark regression problems, comparing it to
equivalent shallow neural networks, BART, and ordinary least squares. Our
Bayesian Additive Regression Networks (BARN) provide more consistent and often
more accurate results. On test data benchmarks, BARN averaged between 5 to 20
percent lower root mean square error. This error performance does come at the
cost, however, of greater computation time. BARN sometimes takes on the order
of a minute where competing methods take a second or less. But, BARN without
cross-validated hyperparameter tuning takes about the same amount of
computation time as tuned other methods. Yet BARN is still typically more
accurate.