An improved synthesis method for multilayered neural networks using qualitative knowledge

An improved synthesis method for the multilayered neural network (NN) as function approximator is proposed. The method offers a translation mechanism that maps the qualitative knowledge into a multilayered NN structure. Qualitative knowledge is expressed in the form of representative points, which can be linguistically described as, `when x is around x_i, then y_i is around y´. Synthesis equations for the translation mechanism are provided. After the direct synthesis of the initial NN, the NN is tuned by backpropagation (BP), using the training data. The direct synthesis decreases the burden on BP and contributes to improved learning efficiency, accuracy, and stability. It is demonstrated that the translation mechanism is also useful for incremental modeling, i.e., increasing the number of neurons, or representative points, based on the results of BP