Initializing RBF-Networks with Small Subsets of Training Examples

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Hybrid Methods

An important research issue in RBF networks is how to determine the gaussian centers of the radial-basis functions. We investigate a technique that identifies these centers with carefully selected training examples, with the objective to minimize the network’s size. The essence is to select three very small subsets rather than one larger subset whose size would exceed the size of the three small subsets unified. The subsets complement each other in the sense that when used by a nearest-neighbor classifier, each of them incurs errors in a different part of the instance space. The paper describes the example-selection algorithm and shows, experimentally, its merits in the design of RBF networks.