A graph grammar approach to generate neural network topologies

Neural networks are increasingly becoming a useful and popular choice for process modeling. The success of neural networks in effectively modeling a certain problem depends on the topology of the neural network. Generating topologies manually relies on previous neural network experience and is tedious and difficult. Hence there is a rising need for a method that generates neural network topologies for different problems automatically. Current methods such as growing, pruning and using genetic algorithms for this task are very complicated and do not explore all the possible topologies. This paper presents a novel method of automatically generating neural networks using a graph grammar. The approach involves representing the neural network as a graph and defining graph transformation rules to generate the topologies. The approach is simple, efficient and has the ability to create topologies of varying complexity. Two example problems are presented to demonstrate the power of our approach.