Scaling behavior of cross-entropy loss in the identification of percolation phase transitions.

Abstract

The cross-entropy loss function is widely used in machine learning to measure the performance of a classification model. Interestingly, our study find that this function has scaling behavior when deep neural networks are used to investigate percolation models. Specifically, we use convolutional neural networks with different pooling methods to study the site percolation on square lattices under two labeling methods (labeling based on spanning cluster and the exact solution of the critical point). Subsequently, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) with different pooling methods are utilized to do the same kind of experiment. Finally, the GCN with different pooling methods is used to study the percolation phase transitions on the Erdős-Rényi (ER) networks under labeling based on the critical point. The reliability of the classifiers is detected by the values of the critical point p_{c} and critical exponent ν which are obtained by the scaling behaviors of the percolation probability. The results demonstrate that the scaling exponent of cross-entropy ψ/ν depends on the labeling and pooling methods. Labeling based on critical points, which is equivalent to labeling based on spanning clusters in infinite systems, can be used to investigate the critical behaviors in finite systems. SAGPooling-Mean is an effective pooling method to study the scaling behavior of cross-entropy loss on two-dimensional square lattices and ER networks.