Deep Belief Networks (DBN) have been successful in classification especially image recognition tasks. However, the performance of a DBN is often highly dependent on settings in particular the combination of runtime parameter values. In this work, we propose a hyper-heuristic based framework which can optimise DBNs independent from the problem domain. It is the first time hyper-heuristic entering this domain. The framework iteratively selects suitable heuristics based on a heuristic set, apply the heuristic to tune the DBN to better fit with the current search space. Under this framework the setting of DBN learning is adaptive. Three well-known image reconstruction benchmark sets were used for evaluating the performance of this new approach. Our experimental results show this hyper-heuristic approach can achieve high accuracy under different scenarios on diverse image sets. In addition state-of-the-art meta-heuristic methods for tuning DBN were introduced for comparison. The results illustrate that our hyper- heuristic approach can obtain better performance on almost all test cases.
