Choose CNN architecture first, then optimize parameters - validation vs test performance to pick architecture?
I am doing a few experiments on medical data. I am about to transfer learn the pretrained networks for my problem.
Firstly, I have to pick a network architecture. Secondly, I would like to optimize it's parameters/parameters of optimizer, to get better performance.
I would like to pick the network architecture based on 10-fold cross validation of several architectures. I will perform cross validation in a way that I have data split to train:test in a 80:20 manner, then train is split into 10 splits. Test set shouldn't ever change. Based on the cross validation, I would like to pick a model I would optimize further on validation set.
Is it okay to test the best architecture on test data too, to see whatever I am moving in a right direction, before optimizing the parameters or am I cheating?
The dataset is imbalanced with relatively high class variance, so I am not even sure whatever the 2 folds for testing will trully represent the dataset.
Thanks
Topic cnn image-classification cross-validation
Category Data Science