Power-law scaling, a central concept in critical phenomena, is found to be useful in deep learning, where optimized test errors on handwritten digit examples converge as a power-law to zero with database size. For rapid decision making with one training epoch, each example is presented only once to the trained network, the power-law exponent increased with the number of hidden layers. For the largest dataset, the obtained test error was estimated to be in the proximity of state-of-the-art algorithms for large epoch numbers. Power-law scaling assists with key challenges found in current artificial intelligence applications and facilitates an a priori dataset size estimation to achieve a desired test accuracy. It establishes a benchmark for measuring training complexity and a quantitative hierarchy of machine learning tasks and algorithms.
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