Minimal Structure of Self-Organizing HCMAC Neural Network Classifier

The authors previously proposed a self-organizing Hierarchical Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (HCMAC) neural network containing a hierarchical GCMAC neural network and a self-organizing input space module to solve high-dimensional pattern classification problems. This novel neural network exhibits fast learning, a low memory requirement, automatic memory parameter determination and highly accurate high-dimensional pattern classification. However, the original architecture needs to be hierarchically expanded using a full binary tree topology to solve pattern classification problems according to the dimension of the input vectors. This approach creates many redundant GCMAC nodes when the dimension of the input vectors in the pattern classification problem does not exactly match that in the self-organizing HCMAC neural network. These redundant GCMAC nodes waste memory units and degrade the learning performance of a self-organizing HCMAC neural network. Therefore, this study presents a minimal structure of self-organizing HCMAC (MHCMAC) neural network with the same dimension of input vectors as the pattern classification problem. Additionally, this study compares the learning performance of this novel learning structure with those of the BP neural network,support vector machine (SVM), and original self-organizing HCMAC neural network in terms of ten benchmark pattern classification data sets from the UCI machine learning repository. In particular, the experimental results reveal that the self-organizing MHCMAC neural network handles high-dimensional pattern classification problems better than the BP, SVM or the original self-organizing HCMAC neural network. Moreover, the proposed self-organizing MHCMAC neural network significantly reduces the memory requirement of the original self-organizing HCMAC neural network, and has a high training speed and higher pattern classification accuracy than the original self-organizing HCMAC neural network in most testing benchmark data sets. The experimental results also show that the MHCMAC neural network learns continuous function well and is suitable for Web page classification.