The Broad Impact of Feature Imitation: Neural Enhancements Across
  Financial, Speech, and Physiological Domains
Reza Khanmohammadi Tuka Alhanai Mohammad M. Ghassemi
Initialization of neural network weights plays a pivotal role in determining
their performance. Feature Imitating Networks (FINs) offer a novel strategy by
initializing weights to approximate specific closed-form statistical features,
setting a promising foundation for deep learning architectures. While the
applicability of FINs has been chiefly tested in biomedical domains, this study
extends its exploration into other time series datasets. Three different
experiments are conducted in this study to test the applicability of imitating
Tsallis entropy for performance enhancement: Bitcoin price prediction, speech
emotion recognition, and chronic neck pain detection. For the Bitcoin price
prediction, models embedded with FINs reduced the root mean square error by
around 1000 compared to the baseline. In the speech emotion recognition task,
the FIN-augmented model increased classification accuracy by over 3 percent.
Lastly, in the CNP detection experiment, an improvement of about 7 percent was
observed compared to established classifiers. These findings validate the broad
utility and potency of FINs in diverse applications.