A combined method for improving backpropagation algorithm

The authors present a new approach, called a combined method, for improving the backpropagation algorithm. They describe the standard backpropagation learning method and Newton´s method. Experiments on three problems are reported: exclusive-OR, the encoder and the parity problem. The learning speeds are compared by epochs and CPU time. The performance of the combined method and Newton´s method is compared. Experiments show that the combined method is faster than the standard backpropagation in epochs and more efficient than Newton´s method in spaces and computations