Evolutionary Optimization of Residual Neural Network Architectures for Modulation Classification

Abstract

Automatic modulation classification receives significant interest in the context of current and future wireless communication systems. Deep learning emerged as a powerful tool for modulation classification, as it allows for joint discriminative features learning and signal classification. However, the optimization of deep neural network architectures for modulation classification is a manual and time-consuming process that requires profound domain knowledge and much effort. Most state-of-the-art solutions focus mainly on classification accuracy, while optimization of network complexity is neglected. This paper presents a novel bi-objective memetic algorithm, BO-NSMA, to search optimal deep neural network architectures for modulation classification to maximize classification accuracy and minimize network complexity. The experiments show that BO-NSMA, with an initial population of six individuals and only ten generations, finds a deep neural network architecture that outperforms all human-crafted architectures. Furthermore, BO-NSMA discovered the first low-complexity Convolutional neural network architecture, which achieves slightly better performance than costly Recurrent neural network architectures, allowing a 2.9-fold reduction in network complexity with 1.43% performance improvement. Compared to counterparts from network architecture search, BO-NSMA finds the best architecture, which achieves up to 18.73% accuracy gain and up to an 82-fold reduction in network complexity. The results are validated using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test.