Nish: A Novel Negative Stimulated Hybrid Activation Function

Abstract

An activation function has a significant impact on the efficiency and robustness of the neural networks. As an alternative, we evolved a cutting-edge non-monotonic activation function, Negative Stimulated Hybrid Activation Function (Nish). It acts as a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) function for the positive region and a sinus-sigmoidal function for the negative region. In other words, it incorporates a sigmoid and a sine function and gaining new dynamics over classical ReLU. We analyzed the consistency of the Nish for different combinations of essential networks and most common activation functions using on several most popular benchmarks. From the experimental results, we reported that the accuracy rates achieved by the Nish is slightly better than compared to the Mish in classification.