Accelerating Learning Performance of Back Propagation Algorithm by Using Adaptive Gain Together with Adaptive Momentum and Adaptive Learning Rate on Classification Problems

The back propagation (BP) algorithm is a very popular learning approach in multilayer feedforward networks. However, the most serious problems associated with the BP are local minima problem and slow convergence speeds. Over the years, many improvements and modifications of the BP learning algorithm have been reported. In this research, we propose a new modified BP learning algorithm by introducing adaptive gain together with adaptive momentum and adaptive learning rate into weight update process. By computer simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can give a better convergence rate and can find a good solution in early time compare to the conventional BP. We use four common benchmark classification problems to illustrate the improvement in convergence time.