Selecting Input Variables Using Mutual Informationand Nonparametric Density

In learning problems where a connectionist network is trained with a nite sized training set, better generalization performance is often obtained when unneeded weights in the network are eliminated. One source of unneeded weights comes from the inclusion of input variables that provide little information about the output variables. We propose a method for identifying and eliminating these input variables. The method rst determines the relationship between input and output variables using nonparametric density estimation and then measures the relevance of input variables using the information theoretic concept of mutual information. We present results from our method on a simple toy problem and a nonlinear time series.