An ART-based construction of RBF networks

Radial basis function (RBF) networks are widely used for modeling a function from given input-output patterns. However, two difficulties are involved with traditional RBF (TRBF) networks: The initial configuration of an RBF network needs to be determined by a trial-and-error method, and the performance suffers when the desired output has abrupt changes or constant values in certain intervals. We propose a novel approach to over. come these difficulties. New kernel functions are used for hidden nodes, and the number of nodes is determined automatically by an adaptive resonance theory (ART)-like algorithm. Parameters and weights are initialized appropriately, and then tuned and adjusted by the gradient-descent method to improve the performance of the network. Experimental results have shown that the RBF networks constructed by our method have a smaller number of nodes, a faster learning speed, and a smaller approximation error than the networks produced by other methods.