Automatic Neural Architecture Search Based on an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm for Binary Classification of Image Databases

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used for image classification; however, setting the appropriate hyperparameters before training is subjective and time consuming, and the search space is not properly explored. This paper presents a novel method for the automatic neural architecture search based on an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) for binary classification problems. The hyperparameters were coded in binary form due to the nature of the metaheuristics used in the automatic search stage of CNN architectures which was performed using the Boltzmann Univariate Marginal Distribution algorithm (BUMDA) chosen by statistical comparison between four metaheuristics to explore the search space, whose computational complexity is O ( 2 29 ). Moreover, the proposed method is compared with multiple state-of-the-art methods on five databases, testing its efficiency in terms of accuracy and F1-score. In the experimental results, the proposed method achieved an F1-score of 97.2%, 98.73%, 97.23%, 98.36%, and 98.7% in its best evaluation, better results than the literature. Finally, the computational time of the proposed method for the test set was ≈0.6 s, 1 s, 0.7 s, 0.5 s, and 0.1 s, respectively.