Learning behavior and temporary minima of two-layer neural networks

This paper presents a mathematical analysis of the occurrence of temporary minima during training of a single-output, two-layer neural network, with learning according to the back-propagation algorithm. A new vector decomposition method is introduced, which simplifies the mathematical analysis of learning of neural networks considerably. The analysis shows that temporary minima are inherent to multilayer networks learning. A number of numerical results illustrate the analytical conclusions