Understandable ReLU Neural Network for Signal Classification

ReLU neural networks suffer from a problem of explainability because they partition the input space into a lot of polyhedrons. This paper proposes a constrained neural network model that replaces polyhedrons by orthotopes: each hidden neuron processes only a single component of the input signal. When the number of hidden neurons is large, we show that our neural network is equivalent to a logistic regression whose input is a non-linear transformation of the processed signal. Hence, the training of our neural network always converges to a unique solution. Numerical simulations show that the loss of performance with respect to state-of-the-art methods is negligible even though our neural network is strongly constrained on robustness and explainability.