A survey of swarm and evolutionary computing approaches for deep learning

Deep learning (DL) has become an important machine learning approach that has been widely successful in many applications. Currently, DL is one of the best methods of extracting knowledge from large sets of raw data in a (nearly) self-organized manner. The technical design of DL depends on the feed-forward information flow principle of artificial neural networks with multiple layers of hidden neurons, which form deep neural networks (DNNs). DNNs have various architectures and parameters and are often developed for specific applications. However, the training process of DNNs can be prolonged based on the application and training set size (Gong et al. 2015 ). Moreover, finding the most accurate and efficient architecture of a deep learning system in a reasonable time is a potential difficulty associated with this approach. Swarm intelligence (SI) and evolutionary computing (EC) techniques represent simulation-driven non-convex optimization frameworks with few assumptions based on objective functions. These methods are flexible and have been proven effective in many applications; therefore, they can be used to improve DL by optimizing the applied learning models. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the most recent approaches involving the hybridization of SI and EC algorithms for DL, the architecture of DNNs, and DNN training to improve the classification accuracy. The paper reviews the significant roles of SI and EC in optimizing the hyper-parameters and architectures of a DL system in context to large scale data analytics. Finally, we identify some open problems for further research, as well as potential issues related to DL that require improvements, and an extensive bibliography of the pertinent research is presented.