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I am using Octave to generate a Neural Network with a single hidden layer, and saving it as two CSV files.

Is there a utility or software that will load the files and create an image, PDF or HTML page that displays the weights over edges connecting neurons?

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I don't think this a good fit for us. – Chuck Sherrington Aug 16 '12 at 11:30
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@ChuckSherrington I was the one that flagged this for migration. This sort of visualization of the network as a series of edges with weights over them (this is what OP desires, see comment on answer) is a practical concern for CogSci modelers that use neural nets. This is not purely a stats question because unlike modelers, statisticians don't care that much about drawing the connections. – Artem Kaznatcheev Aug 16 '12 at 13:08
@ArtemKaznatcheev Never mind, we'll talk later... – Chuck Sherrington Aug 16 '12 at 15:57

migrated from stats.stackexchange.com Aug 16 '12 at 11:14

2 Answers

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If you have CSV files a quick way to generate images would be to open it in Excel (or a similar spreadsheet software) and use some sort of colour scale conditional formatting (under home>styles in Microsoft Excel) - set the width and heights of the cells to small in order to view all the data at once.

You could also use a surface chart in order to visualise the data in Excel.

Otherwise if you are familiar with a tool like Matlab or R, you might wish to use some sort of graphic tool to represent it, e.g. meshgrid in Matlab might work.

Matlab and/or R can be programmed to load several CSV files and create graphics from them. The first two techniques I mentioned (although accessible to a more novice computer user) have to be carried out manually.

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I don't think Excel will do it because the CSV files hold the weights. So it needs to process each cell and display the weight over the arrow. A Matlab tool might work if it is available for Octave...meshgrid seems to be used for drawing 3D charts. – B Seven Apr 20 '12 at 22:20
Usually weights are visualised as a grid of colours, with each square in the grid representing a separate weight. I am currently unaware of tools that display weights over the lines connecting the neurons. Meshgrid can also be used to display 2D charts if I'm not mistaken. You could alternatively rotate the view in order to display the mesh from top-down. HTH – Andrew Apr 21 '12 at 18:20
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For what it's worth, I did a lot of research and did not find a solution.

So I created my own using HTML, jQuery and a canvas. It's not pretty, but it does not require a lot of work because the functionality is simple: When you click on a node, display its edges and the associated weights.

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