Evolving Efficient CNN Based Model for Image Classification

Evolutionary algorithms, rooted in Darwin's theorem, can be considered as a base for implementing deep/machine learning models. This approach can noticeably increase the accuracy in most cases as shown in this paper. This experiment aims to evaluate the performance of two evolutionary algorithms, an evolutionary neural network (ENN) and an evolutionary CNN-based algorithm with mutation and crossover (ECNNB), on the Fashion-MNIST, MNIST, and EMNIST_Digits datasets. The performance of the ENN algorithm is examined for 10, 50, and 100 generations, with 50 generations being used due to computational limitations. The results show that the accuracy of the model improves as the number of generations increases. However, the ECNNB model consistently outperforms the ENN model on all three datasets, with an average accuracy of 92.58% on Fashion-MNIST, 99.32% on MNIST, and 99.50% on EMNIST_Digits, compared to 88.54 %, 98.05 %, and 98.95 %, respectively, for the ENN model. The performance of both models is compared with other state-of-the-art models in the literature. These results highlight the significance of well-designed models in achieving high accuracy in machine learning tasks.