Convolutional Neural Networks-Based Lung Nodule Classification: A Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm for Hyperparameter Optimization

This article investigates deep neural networks (DNNs)-based lung nodule classification with hyperparameter optimization. Hyperparameter optimization in DNNs is a computationally expensive problem, and a surrogate-Assisted evolutionary algorithm has been recently introduced to automatically search for optimal hyperparameter configurations of DNNs, by applying computationally efficient surrogate models to approximate the validation error function of hyperparameter configurations. Different from existing surrogate models adopting stationary covariance functions (kernels) to measure the difference between hyperparameter points, this article proposes a nonstationary kernel that allows the surrogate model to adapt to functions whose smoothness varies with the spatial location of inputs. A multilevel convolutional neural network (ML-CNN) is built for lung nodule classification, and the hyperparameter configuration is optimized by the proposed nonstationary kernel-based Gaussian surrogate model. Our algorithm searches with a surrogate for optimal setting via a hyperparameter importance-based evolutionary strategy, and the experiments demonstrate our algorithm outperforms manual tuning and several well-established hyperparameter optimization methods, including random search, grid search, the tree-structured parzen estimator (TPE) approach, Gaussian processes (GP) with stationary kernels, and the recently proposed hyperparameter optimization via RBF and dynamic (HORD) coordinate search.