训练和验证损失和数据集大小

Question

I'm new on Neural Networks and I am doing a project that has to define a NN and train it. I've defined a NN of 2 hidden layers with 17 inputs and 17 output. The NN has 21 inputs and 3 outputs.

I have a data set of labels of 10 million, and a dataset of samples of another 10 million. My first issue is about the size of the validation set and the training set. I'm using PyTorch and batches, and of what I've read, the batches shouldn't be larger. But I don't know how many approximately should be the size of the sets.

I've tried with larger and small numbers, but I cannot find a correlation that shows me if I'm right choosing a large set o small set in one of them (apart from the time that requires to process a very large set).

My second issue is about the Training and Validation loss, which I've read that can tell me if I'm overfitting or underfitting depending on if it is bigger or smaller. The perfect should be the same value for both, and it also depends on the epochs. But I am not able to tune the network parameters like batch size, learning rate or choosing how much data should I use in the training and validation. If 80% of the set (8 million), it takes hours to finish it, and I'm afraid that if I choose a smaller dataset, it won't learn.

If anything is badly explained, please feel free to ask me for more information. As I said, the data is given, and I only have to define the network and train it with PyTorch.

Thanks!

Answer 1

For your first question about batch size, there is no fix rule for what value should it have. You have to try and see which one works best. When your NN starts performing badly don't go above or below that value for batch size. There is no hard rule here to follow.

For your second question, first of all, having training and validation loss same doesn't mean your NN is performing nicely, it is just an indication that its performance will be good enough on a test set if the above is the case, but it largely depends on many other things like your train and test set distribution.

And with NN you need to try as many things you can try. Try different parameter values, train and validation split size, etc. You cannot just assume that it won't work.