Achieving a More Robust Neural Network Model for Control of a MR Damper by Signal Sensitivity Analysis

Most neural network models can work accurately on their trained samples, but when encountering noise, there could be significant errors if the trained neural network is not robust enough to resist the noise. Sensitivity to perturbation in the control signal due to noise is very important for the prediction of an output signal. The goal of this paper is to provide a methodology of signal sensitivity analysis in order to enable the selection of an ideal Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) neural network model from a group of MLP models with different parameters, i.e. to get a highly accurate and robust model for control problems. This paper proposes a signal sensitivity which depends upon the variance of the output error due to noise in the input signals of a single output MLP with differentiable activation functions. On the assumption that noise arises from additive/multiplicative perturbations, the signal sensitivity of the MLP model can be easily calculated, and a method of lowering the sensitivity of the MLP model is proposed. A control system of a magnetorheological (MR) fluid damper, which is a relatively new type of device that shows the future promise for the control of vibration, is modelled by MLP. A large number of simulations on the MR damper’s MLP model show that a much better model is selected using the proposed method.