Evolving neural network pattern classifiers

This work investigates the application of evolutionary programming for automatically configuring neural network architectures for pattern classification tasks. The evolutionary programming search procedure implements a parallel nonlinear regression technique and represents a powerful method for evaluating a multitude of neural network model hypotheses. The evolutionary programming search is augmented with the Solis & Wets random optimization method thereby maintaining the integrity of the stochastic search while taking into account empirical information about the response surface. A network architecture is proposed which is motivated by the structures generated in projection pursuit regression and the cascade-correlation learning architecture. Results are given for the 3-bit parity, normally distributed data, and the T-C classifier problems.

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