Locating the Parameters of RBF Networks Using a Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization Method

Abstract

In the present work, an innovative two-phase method is presented for parameter tuning in radial basis function artificial neural networks. These kinds of machine learning models find application in many scientific fields in classification problems or in function regression. In the first phase, a technique based on particle swarm optimization is performed to locate a promising interval of values for the network parameters. Particle swarm optimization was used as it is a highly reliable method for global optimization problems, and in addition, it is one of the fastest and most-flexible techniques of its class. In the second phase, the network was trained within the optimal interval using a global optimization technique such as a genetic algorithm. Furthermore, in order to speed up the training of the network and due to the use of a two-stage method, parallel programming techniques were utilized. The new method was applied to a number of famous classification and regression datasets, and the results were more than promising.