Combining cluster analysis and neural networks for the classification problem

The extensive researches have compared the performance of neural networks(NN) with those of various statistical techniques for the classification problem. The empirical results of these comparative studies have indicated that the neural networks often outperform the traditional statistical techniques. Moreover, there are some efforts that try to combine various classification methods, especially multivariate discriminant analysis with neural networks. While these efforts improve the performance, there exists a problem violating robust assumptions of multivariate discriminant analysis that are multivariate normality of the independent variables and equality of variance-covariance matrices in each of the groups. On the contrary, cluster analysis alleviates this assumption like neural networks. We propose a new approach to classification problems by combining the cluster analysis with neural networks. The resulting predictions of the composite model are more accurate than each individual technique.