Handling Noise in Evolutionary Neural Network Design

In this chapter, we consider the design of artificial neural networks (ANNs) as an instance of noisy design problem. In the context of ANN design, evolutionary optimization has led to the development of evolutionary artificial neural networks (EANN) in which adaptation is performed primarily by means of evolution. Given that the intrinsic relationship between the architecture and the associated synaptic weights can be quite complex, the design methodology would be flawed if we were to decouple these two properties during the training phase of the network. The design of ANN has two intrinsical noise sources: