Statistical Significance Test for Neural Network Classification

Abstract

Model selection in neural networks can be guided by statistical procedures, such as hypothesis tests, informationcriteria and cross validation. Taking a statistical perspective is especially important for nonparametric models likeneural networks, because the reason for applying them is the lack of knowledge about an adequate functionalform. Many researchers have developed model selection strategies for neural networks which are based onstatistical concepts. In this paper, we focused on the model evaluation by implementing statistical significancetest. We used Wald-test to evaluate the relevance of parameters in the networks for classification problem.Parameters with no significance influence on any of the network outputs have to be removed. In general, theresults show that Wald-test work properly to determine significance of each weight from the selected model. Anempirical study by using Iris data yields all parameters in the network are significance, except bias at the firstoutput neuron.