Re: Start up help request

Hi Jeff,

Many thanks for the feedback. Still having a few issues, but I'll take them offline with you, and return to your question about how BP might best be presented in Simbrain.

Setting up the network at present is simple, so no change needed there.  

Data management can be tricky, but the basics are already just about available.  I would suggest that rather than loading training data and output data through the subnetwork menu, instead the user ought to be encouraged to open up data worlds: one each for training, testing, and validation, if that is done.  It would be good to be able to keep the input patterns and the desired targets in the same csv file.  

I wouldn't work too hard on facilitating automated training, error monitoring, verification and testing.  Instead, the user should run the network with a single data world at a time.  Manually changing the I/O dataset to perform verification by hand, and to test at the end, is not too onerous, and while not what one would want in an optimized system, might be a good idea for a teaching system.  No special suport for verification and testing are necessary, as long as the user remembers to clamp the weights before using them.

However a key utility that is missing and that would make all this work well in a teaching setting is graphing: continuous graphing of error is essential to make sense of the training protocol.  I know you are working on some graphing for 3.0, but I would suggest it would be a good thing to prioritize.  Plotting the individual activation functions in input space is also useful, as for example here: http://cspeech.ucd.ie/~fred/teaching/oldcourses/ann98/bpexample.html

I'd be happy to discuss further, or help out, of course!

Fred