Simultaneous approximation of a smooth function and its derivatives by deep neural networks with piecewise-polynomial activations

Abstract

This paper investigates the approximation properties of deep neural networks with piecewise-polynomial activation functions. We derive the required depth, width, and sparsity of a deep neural network to approximate any H\"{o}lder smooth function up to a given approximation error in H\"{o}lder norms in such a way that all weights of this neural network are bounded by $1$. The latter feature is essential to control generalization errors in many statistical and machine learning applications.