Self-organized Learning in Complexity Growing of Radial Basis Function Networks

To obtain good performance of radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, it needs very careful consideration in design. The selection of several parameters such as the number of centers and widths of the radial basis functions must be considered carefully since they critically affect the network's performance. We propose a learning algorithm for growing of complexity of RBF neural networks which is adapted automatically according to the complexity of tasks. The algorithm generates a new basis function based on the errors of network, the percentage of decreasing rate of errors and the nearest distance from input data to the center of hidden unit. The RBF's center is located at the point where the maximum of absolute interference error occurs in the input space. The width is calculated based on the standard deviation of distance between the center and inputs data. The steepest descent method is also applied for adjusting the weights, centers, and widths. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm, general problem of function estimation is evaluated. The results obtained from the simulation show that the proposed algorithm for RBF neural networks yields good performance in terms of convergence and accuracy compared with those obtained by conventional multilayer feedforward networks.