  Deep learning has recently demonstrated its ability to rival the human brain
for visual object recognition. As datasets get larger, a natural question to
ask is if existing deep learning architectures can be extended to handle the
50+K classes thought to be perceptible by a typical human. Most deep learning
architectures concentrate on splitting diverse categories, while ignoring the
similarities amongst them. This paper introduces a framework that automatically
analyzes and configures a family of smaller deep networks as a replacement to a
singular, larger network. Class similarities guide the creation of a family
from course to fine classifiers which solve categorical problems more
effectively than a single large classifier. The resulting smaller networks are
highly scalable, parallel and more practical to train, and achieve higher
classification accuracy. This paper also proposes a method to adaptively select
the configuration of the hierarchical family of classifiers using linkage
statistics from overall and sub-classification confusion matrices. Depending on
the number of classes and the complexity of the problem, a deep learning model
is selected and the complexity is determined. Numerous experiments on network
classes, layers, and architecture configurations validate our results.

Machine Learning;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition