To facilitate crossing from the "black box" to "glass box" in the application of neural net- works, we extend Horel and Giesecke (2020) and develop a variable/feature significant test for multi-layer perceptrons (MLP). The proposed test permits one to assess the statistical significance of the...

To facilitate crossing from the "black box" to "glass box" in the application of neural networks (NNs), we develop a variable significant test for the multi-layer perceptrons. To derive the test statistic and its asymptotic distribution, we provide the consistency of the multi-layer perceptrons...

A multi-layer, multi-node ReLU network is a powerful, efficient, and popular tool in statistical prediction tasks. However, in contrast to the great emphasis on its empirical applications, its statistical properties are rarely investigated which is mainly due to its severe nonlinearity and heavy...