Iterative Improvement of Neural Classifiers

May 2004

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

Volume

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

All Papers

A new objective function for neural net classifier design is presented, which has more free parameters than the classical objective function. An iterative minimization technique for the objective function is derived which requires the solution of multiple sets of numerically ill-conditioned linear equations. An enhanced feedforward network training algorithm is derived, which solves linear equations for output weights and reduces a separate error function with respect to hidden layer weights. The design method is applied to networks used to classify aerial survey imagery from remote sensing and to networks used to classify handprinted numeral image data. The improvement of the iterative technique over classical design approaches is clearly demonstrated.