Keras model accuracy not improving

Question

I'm trying to train a neural network to predict the ratings for players in FIFA 18 by easports (ratings are between 64-99). I'm using their players database (https://easports.com/fifa/ultimate-team/api/fut/item?page=1) and I've processed the data into training_x, testing_x, training_y, testing_y. Each of the training samples is a numpy array containing 7 values...the first 6 are the different stats of the player (shooting, passing, dribbling, etc) and the last value is the position of the player (which I mapped between 1-8, depending on the position), and each of the testing values is a single integer between 64-99, representing the rating of that player.

I've tried many different hyperparameters, including changing the activation functions to tanh and relu, and I've tried adding a batch normalization layer after the first dense layer (I thought that it might be useful since one of my features is very small and the other features are between 50-99), I've played around with the SGD optimizer (changed the learning rate, momentum, even tried changing the optimizer to Adam), tried different loss functions, added/removed dropout layers, and tried different regularizers for the weights of the model.

model = Sequential()
model.add(Dense(64, input_shape=(7,), 
          kernel_regularizer=regularizers.l2(0.01)))
//batch normalization?
model.add(Activation('sigmoid'))
model.add(Dense(64, kernel_regularizer=regularizers.l2(0.01), 
          activation='sigmoid'))
model.add(Dropout(0.3))
model.add(Dense(32, kernel_regularizer=regularizers.l2(0.01), 
          activation='sigmoid'))
model.add(Dense(1, activation='linear'))
sgd = optimizers.SGD(lr=0.01, decay=1e-6, momentum=0.9, nesterov=True)
model.compile(loss='mean_absolute_error', metrics=['accuracy'], 
          optimizer=sgd)
model.fit(training_x, training_y, epochs=50, batch_size=128, shuffle=True)

When I train the model, the loss is always nan and the accuracy is always 0, even though I've tried adjusting a lot of different parameters. However, if I remove the last feature from my data, the position of the players, and update the input shape of the first dense layer, the model actually "trains" and ends up with around 6% accuracy no matter what parameters I change. In that case, I've found that the model only predicts 79 to be the player's rating. What am I doing inherently wrong?

Probably you need to normalize your data before feeding theme into your network. — pouyan

Shubham Panchal Shubham Panchal · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-17T09:13:19

You can try the following steps :

Use mean squared error loss function.
Use Adam which will help you converge faster with low learning rate like 0.0001 or 0.001. Otherwise, try using the RMSprop optimizer.
Use the default regularizers. That is none actually.
Since this is a regression task, use activation function like ReLU in all the layers except the output layer ( including the input layer ). Use linear activation in output layer.
As mentioned in the comments by @pooyan , normalize the features. See here. Even try standardizing the features. Use whichever suites the best.

Keras model accuracy not improving

1 Answers