How can I create a non-fully connected neural network?

Can I create a non-fully connected neural network using Matlab? I mean I try to connect the neuron as I want, can I? Thanks!

Answer 1

[Saurabh Gupta]

You can create a custom neural network and control the connections as per your requirement. The following documentation describes one example of custom neural network architecture for your reference.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2017a/nnet/ug/create-and-train-custom-neural-network-architectures.html

The following documentation page has a wealth of related resources that you can explore and use as applicable.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/releases/R2017a/nnet/define-neural-network-architectures.html

I hope this helps!

[Xiaomin Li]

Thanks a lot!

[zafar khan]

HI Li and Saurabh, I am trying to do something similar but i cannot comprehend how to achieve a a sparse network. Although i can change number of neurons in each layer but that doesn not mean network is not fully connected. The weights automatically connect all weights of previousl layer neurons lets 'n' to all of the next layer neuron lets say 'm' creating a m*n weights matrix. How can i avoid this but creating a network where one neuron doesnot receive data for all neurons but from only one. I will appreciate if you can help me with this. I have tried to look in the links but no joy.

[Xiao Gao]

Hi Khan, I am dealing with the same problem. The strategy I am thinking about is dividing the initial inupt vector into several sub-vectors, even only one variable for one sub-vector, and initializing arbitrarily each sub-vector's connection with the following layers. It seems kind of redundant but I hope it works.