Implementation of Elbow Method to improve the Gases Classification Performance based on the RBFN-NSG Algorithm

Abstract

Currently, the radial basis function network (RBFN) and various other neural networks are employed to classify gases using chemical sensors arrays, and their performance is steadily improving. In particular, the identification performance of the RBFN algorithm is being improved by optimizing parameters such as the center, width, and weight, and improved algorithms such as the radial basis function network–stochastic gradient (RBFN-SG) and radial basis function network–normalized stochastic gradient (RBFN-NSG) have been announced. In this study, we optimized the number of centers, which is one of the parameters of the RBFN-NSG algorithm, and observed the change in the identification performance. For the experiment, repeated measurement data of 8 samples were used, and the elbow method was applied to determine the optimal number of centers for each sample of input data. The experiment was carried out in two cases(the only one center per sample and the optimal number of centers obtained by elbow method), and the experimental results were compared using the mean square error (MSE). From the results of the experiments, we observed that the case having an optimal number of centers, obtained using the elbow method, showed a better identification performance than that without any optimization.