Accuracy value goes up and down on the training process - machine-learning

Question

After training the network I noticed that accuracy goes up and down. Initially I thought it is caused by the learning rate, but it is set to quite small value. Please check the screenshot attached.
Plot Accuracy Screenshot
My network (in Pytorch) looks as follow:
class Network(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(Network,self).__init__()
self.layer1 = nn.Sequential(
nn.Conv2d(3,16,kernel_size=3),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.MaxPool2d(2)
)
self.layer2 = nn.Sequential(
nn.Conv2d(16,32, kernel_size=3),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.MaxPool2d(2)
)
self.layer3 = nn.Sequential(
nn.Conv2d(32,64, kernel_size=3),
nn.ReLU(),
nn.MaxPool2d(2)
)
self.fc1 = nn.Linear(17*17*64,512)
self.fc2 = nn.Linear(512,1)
self.relu = nn.ReLU()
self.sigmoid = nn.Sigmoid()
def forward(self,x):
out = self.layer1(x)
out = self.layer2(out)
out = self.layer3(out)
out = out.view(out.size(0),-1)
out = self.relu(self.fc1(out))
out = self.fc2(out)
out = torch.sigmoid(out)
return out
I am using RMSprop as optimizer and BCELoss as criterion. The learning rate is set to 0.001
Here is the training process:
epochs = 15
itr = 1
p_itr = 100
model.train()
total_loss = 0
loss_list = []
acc_list = []
for epoch in range(epochs):
for samples, labels in train_loader:
samples, labels = samples.to(device), labels.to(device)
optimizer.zero_grad()
output = model(samples)
labels = labels.unsqueeze(-1)
labels = labels.float()
loss = criterion(output, labels)
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()
total_loss += loss.item()
scheduler.step()
if itr%p_itr == 0:
pred = torch.argmax(output, dim=1)
correct = pred.eq(labels)
acc = torch.mean(correct.float())
print('[Epoch {}/{}] Iteration {} -> Train Loss: {:.4f}, Accuracy: {:.3f}'.format(epoch+1, epochs, itr, total_loss/p_itr, acc))
loss_list.append(total_loss/p_itr)
acc_list.append(acc)
total_loss = 0
itr += 1
My dataset is quite small - 2000 train and 1000 validation (binary classification 0/1). I wanted to do the 80/20 split but I was asked to keep it like that. I was thinking that the architecture might be too complex for such a small dataset.
Any hits what may cause such jumps in the training process?

Answer 1

Your code here is wrong: pred = torch.argmax(output, dim=1)
This line using for multiclass classification with Cross-Entropy Loss.
Your task is binary classification so the pred values are wrong. Change to:
if itr%p_itr == 0:
pred = torch.round(output)
....
You can change your optimizer to Adam, SGD, or RMSprop to find the suitable optimizer that helps your model coverage faster.
Also change the forward() function:
def forward(self,x):
out = self.layer1(x)
out = self.layer2(out)
out = self.layer3(out)
out = out.view(out.size(0),-1)
out = self.relu(self.fc1(out))
out = self.fc2(out)
return self.sigmoid(out) #use your forward is ok, but this cleaner