Improving neural networks generalization with new constructive and pruning methods

This paper presents a new constructive method and pruning approaches to control the design of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) without loss in performance. The proposed methods use a multi-objective approach to guarantee generalization. The constructive approach searches for an optimal solution according to the pareto set shape with increasing number of hidden nodes. The pruning methods are able to simplify the network topology and to identify linear connections between the inputs and outputs of the neural model. Topology information and validation sets are used.