20. Pooling Intuition

The next few quizzes will test your understanding of pooling layers.

What Does A Pooling Layer Do?

A pooling layer is generally used to …
SOLUTION:
  • Decrease the size of the output
  • Prevent overfitting

Recently, pooling layers have fallen out of favor. Some reasons are:

  • Recent datasets are so big and complex we're more concerned about underfitting.
  • Dropout is a much better regularizer.
  • Pooling results in a loss of information. Think about the max pooling operation as an example. We only keep the largest of n numbers, thereby disregarding n-1 numbers completely.