Evolutionary Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks

This Master's Thesis is focused on the principles of neural networks, primarily convolutional neural networks (CNN). It introduces the evolutionary optimization in the context of neural networks. One of existing libraries devoted to the CNN design was chosen (Keras), analysed and used in image classification tasks. An optimization technique based on cartesian genetic programming that should reduce the complexity of CNN's computation was proposed and implemented. The impact of the proposed technique on CNN behaviour was evaluated in a case study