Evaluating the Effectiveness of SechKAN on 1D Data

Hoang-Thang Ta

The connection between the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem (KART) and neural network design has led to the development of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), with applications ranging from STEM problems to AI tasks. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of a KAN variant, SechKAN, which relies on hyperbolic secant (sech) functions as basis functions, with a 1D projection to reduce the number of parameters to a level comparable to MLPs. We evaluate SechKAN on three 1D classification datasets: UCI Human Activity Recognition (UCI HAR), ElectricDevices, and Crop, and compare it with several effective networks, including EfficientKAN, MLP, CNN1D, ResNet1D, and DSCNN1D, using approximately comparable parameter budgets. The results indicate that SechKAN achieves competitive performance across the three datasets, with particularly strong performance on Crop. Ablation studies further show that grid size and normalization affect performance, suggesting that SechKAN's effectiveness depends on the dataset and architectural choices. Our source code and experimental implementation are publicly available at: https://github.com/hoangthangta/SechKAN_1D.