Evolutionary Learning-Rate Selection for BPNN with Window Control Scheme

The learning speed of the neural networks, the most important factor in applying to real problems, greatly depends on the learning rate of the networks, Three approaches-empirical, deterministic, and stochastic ones-have been proposed to date. We proposed a new learning-rate selection algorithm using an evolutionary programming search scheme. Even though the performance of our method showed better than those of the other methods, it was found that taking much time for selecting evolutionary learning rates made the performance of our method degrade. This was caused by using static intervals (called static windows) in order to update learning rates. Out algorithm with static windows updated the learning rates showed good performance or didn't update the learning rates even though previously updated learning rates shoved bad performance. This paper introduce a window control scheme to avoid such problems. With the window control scheme, our algorithm try to update the learning ra es only when the learning performance is continuously bad during a specified interval. If previously selected learning rates show good performance, new algorithm will not update the learning rates. This diminish the updating time of learning rates greatly. As a result, our algorithm with the window control scheme show better performance than that with static windows. In this paper, we will describe the previous and new algorithm and experimental results.