Generation and simplification of Artificial Neural Networks by means of Genetic Programming

The development of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is traditionally a slow process in which human experts are needed to experiment on different architectural procedures until they find the one that presents the correct results that solve a specific problem. This work describes a new technique that uses Genetic Programming (GP) in order to automatically develop simple ANNs, with a low number of neurons and connections. Experiments have been carried out in order to measure the behavior of the system and also to compare the results obtained using other ANN generation and training methods with evolutionary computation (EC) tools. The obtained results are, in the worst case, at least comparable to existing techniques and, in many cases, substantially better. As explained herein, the system has other important features such as variable discrimination, which provides new information on the problems to be solved. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.