Improving the reliability of recurrent neural networks while dealing with bad data

In practical applications, machine learning and deep learning models can have difficulty in achieving generalization, especially when dealing with training samples that are either noisy or limited in quantity. Standard neural networks do not guarantee the monotonicity of the input features with respect to the output, therefore they lack interpretability and predictability when it is known a priori that the input-output relationship should be monotonic. This problem can be encountered in the CPG industry, where it is not possible to ensure that a deep learning model will learn the increasing monotonic relationship between promotional mechanics and sales. To overcome this issue, it is proposed the combined usage of recurrent neural networks, a type of artificial neural networks specifically designed to deal with data structured as sequences, with lattice networks, conceived to guarantee monotonicity of the desired input features with respect to the output. The proposed architecture has proven to be more reliable when new samples are fed to the neural network, demonstrating its ability to infer the evolution of the sales depending on the promotions, even when it is trained on bad data.