Please submit in Canvas a single PDF file showing all results, and include code as appendix or as an external repository link in the PDF file.  Cite all appropriate sources you benefit from. Directly exchanging writing/code/results between classmates are not acceptable, but you may talk to each other in classes, office periods, benefit from each others’questions and answers for those.

Question 1 (60%)

In this exercise, you will train many multilayer perceptrons (MLP) to approximate the class label posteriors, using maximum likelihood parameter estimation (equivalently, with minimum average cross-entropy loss) to train the MLP. Then, you will use the trained models to approximate a MAP classification rule in an attempt to achieve minimum probability of error (i.e. to minimize expected loss with 0-1 loss assignments to correct-incorrect decisions).

Data Distribution:  For C = 4 classes with uniform priors, specify Gaussian class-conditional pdfs for a 3-dimensional real-valued random vector x (pick your own mean vectors and covariance matrices for each class).  Try to adjust the parameters of the data distribution so that the MAP classifier that uses the true data pdf achieves between 10% − 20% probability of error.

MLP Structure:  Use a 2-layer MLP (one hidden layer of perceptrons) that has P perceptrons in the first (hidden) layer with smooth-ramp style activation functions (e.g., ISRU, Smooth-ReLU, ELU, etc).  At the second/output layer use a softmax function to ensure all outputs are positive and add up to 1. The best number of perceptrons for your custom problem will be selected using cross-validation.

Generate Data:  Using your specified data distribution, generate multiple datasets: Training datasets with 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 samples and a test dataset with 100000 samples. You will use the test dataset only for performance evaluation.

Theoretically Optimal Classifier:  Using the knowledge of your true data pdf, construct the minimum-probability-of-error classification rule, apply it on the test dataset, and empirically esti- mate the probability of error for this theoretically optimal classifier. This provides the aspirational performance level for the MLP classfier.

Model Order Selection:    For each of the training sets with different number of samples, perform 10-fold cross-validation, using minimum classification error probability as the objective function, to select the best number of perceptrons (that is justified by available training data).

Model Training:  For each training set, having identified the best number of perceptrons using cross-validation, using maximum likelihood parameter estimation (minimum cross-entropy loss) train an MLP using each training set with as many perceptrons as you have identified as optimal for that training set. These are your final trained MLP models for class posteriors (possibly each with different number of perceptrons and different weights). Make sure to mitigate the chances of getting stuck at a local optimum by randomly reinitializing each MLP training routine multiple times and getting the highest training-data log-likelihood solution you encounter.

Performance Assessment:  Using each trained MLP as a model for class posteriors, and using the MAP decision rule (aiming to minimize the probability of error) classify the samples in the test set and for each trained MLP empirically estimate the probability of error.

Report Process and Results:  Describe your process of developing the solution; numerically and visually report the test set empirical probability of error estimates for the theoretically opti- mal and multiple trained MLP classifiers. For instance show a plot of the empirically estimated