The hyperparameter search is computationally expensive. I am wondering if one can tune the hyperparameters independently: tune one hyperparameter for a fixed value of other hyperparameters. For example, let's say we have two hyperparameters, A and B. We search for best value of A at fixed random B, then we search for best value of B at fixed best value of A.
This make sense if the the other hyperparameters does not interfere with the ordering
of the validation loss for the hyperparameter we want to tune. In that sense, the number of units and the number of layers cannot be tuned independently. According to the Y. Bengio's paper (link), at some point the mini-batch size can be tuned independently (page 9, right column, The Mini-Batch Size).
But what about the other ones? Learning rate, activation function, dropout, ... which one can be tuned independently?