Efficient weight initialization method in multi-layer perceptrons

Back-propagation is the most widely used algorithm for supervised learning in multi-layer feed-forward networks. However, back-propagation is very slow in convergence. In this paper, a new weight initialization method, called rough map initialization, in multi-layer perceptrons is proposed. To overcome the long convergence time, possibly due to the random initialization of the weights of the existing multi-layer perceptrons, the rough map initialization method initialize weights by utilizing relationship of input-output features with singular value decomposition technique. The results of this initialization procedure are compared to random initialization procedure in encoder problems and xor problems.