# Model regularization¶

Model over-fitting is the most common cause of sub-optimal model performance. For this reason, various model regularization techniques have emerged in the past years. All of them, naturally, can be used in emloop-tensorflow.

In this brief tutorial we show how to incorporate the most common ones to emloop-tensorflow models.

## Dropout¶

Dropout is well known technique preventing over-fitting introduced by Srivastava et al. in 2014. Simply said, dropout layer randomly selects certain portion of units and sets them to zero. In fact, this is done only in the training phase. For this reason, we need to distinguish training and evaluation phases. In emloop-tensorflow, this information is fed to the model via special scalar tensor defined in emloop_tensorflow.BaseModel and accessible through self.is_training property.

E.g. we can add dropout layer during the model creation as follows:

tensorflow layers
def _create_model(self):
# ...
output = tf.layers.dense(input, 512)
output = tf.layers.dropout(input, 0.5, training=self.is_training)


or if we prefer Keras:

Keras
def _create_model(self):
# ...
output = K.layers.Dense(512)(input)
output = K.layers.Dropout(0.5)(output, training=self.is_training)


## Weight decay¶

Weight decay, also known as L2 regularization is yet another common way to regularize deep learning models. To apply weight decay in emloop-tensorflow, add the regularization cost the REGULARIZATION_LOSSES TensorFlow graph collection.

E.g.:

def _create_model(self):
# ...


Luckily, most of the common layer APIs will do that for you.

Keras adds the regularization cost implicitly
def _create_model(self):
# ...
output = K.layers.Conv2D(64, (3, 3), kernel_regularizer=K.regularizers.l2(0.0001))(net)


Tip

To see the list of utilized regularization loss names, run emloop with --verbose argument.

## Batch normalization¶

Batch normalization appears to be quite popular method improving generalization abilities of deep learning models. Batch normalization layers maintain reasonable activations even in very deep networks by scaling the activations with learned batch statistics. Those statistics (means and variances) have to be updated during the training phase. The update TensorFlow ops are expected in the UPDATE_OPS TensorFlow graph collection.

Again, both Keras and TensorFlow layers API do this for you so that adding batch normalization to your models is simple and lucid.

def _create_model(self):