Hanna Sophia Wutte

Today, various forms of neural networks are trained to perform approximation tasks in many fields. However, the solutions obtained are not wholly understood. Empirical results suggest that the training favors regularized solutions.
These observations motivate us to analyze properties of the solutions found by the gradient descent algorithm frequently employed to perform the training task. As a starting point, we consider one dimensional (shallow) neural networks in which weights are chosen randomly and only the terminal layer is trained. We show, that the resulting solution converges to the smooth spline interpolation of the training data as the number of hidden nodes tends to infinity. This might give valuable insight on the properties of the solutions obtained using gradient descent methods in general settings.