Electromagnetism-like mechanism based algorithm for neural network training

Abstract

Due to the complex nature of training neural network (NN), this problem has gained popularity in the nonlinear optimization field. In order to avoid falling into local minimum because of inappropriate initial weights, a number of global search techniques are developed. This paper applies a novel global algorithm, which is electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) algorithm, to train NN and the EM based algorithm for neural network training is presented. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in classification problems and the comparison with BP and GA algorithms shows its effectiveness. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.