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When creating a neural network, do I update the weights after each run of forward then back propogation? Or do I just keep the random weights and update the Delta variables?

I am looking at slide 8 on these notes:https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/ml/docs/slides/Lecture9.pdf

It says:

For i = m  
 Set a(1) = x(i)  
 Perform Forward-Propogation  
 Compute delta
 Compute DELTA
 QUESTION: Do I update the Weights that I use in Forward-propogation, or do I 
 use random weights and just keep updating the accumulator 'DELTA'? And if I 
 update the weights, do I set them to DELTA?
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For pure stochastic gradient descent, you update the weights after each forward-backward.

When you do the backward phase, you compute the gradients w.r.t. the weights.

You then do the following update:

weights = weights + learningRate * gradWeights

I did not mention more complicated update rules for simplicity.

For batch gradient descent, you accumulate your gradients over the whole batch of samples (i.e. you do a forward-backward pass and do gradWeightsBatch = gradWeightBatch + gradWeight after each backward), and then once you are finished processing the batch, you apply the same update rule:

weights = weights + learningRate * gradWeightsBatch

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  • $\begingroup$ Exactly. Each training pattern gives you a weight update. You can perform the weight update either immediately (on-line learning), every N samples by adding up the updates (mini-batch), or summing up the updates over the entire epoch and then applying them (batch-learning). The discussion which would be the best is an expansive topic. $\endgroup$
    – PawelP
    Jun 4, 2015 at 10:55
  • $\begingroup$ @smhx I am pretty sure you subtract the learningRate * gradWeights(Batch) $\endgroup$ Oct 19, 2018 at 18:37

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