Samples Classification Analysis Across DNN Layers with Fractal Curves

Deep Neural Networks are becoming the prominent solution when using machine learning models. However, they suffer from a blackbox effect that renders complicated their inner workings interpretation and thus the understanding of their successes and failures. Information visualization is one way among others to help in their interpretability and hypothesis deduction. This paper presents a novel way to visualize a trained DNN to depict at the same time its architecture and its way of treating the classes of a test dataset at the layer level. In this way, it is possible to visually detect where the DNN starts to be able to discriminate the classes or where it could decrease its separation ability (and thus detect an oversized network). We have implemented the approach and validated it using several well-known datasets and networks. Results show the approach is promising and deserves further studies.