An application of multilayer neural network on hepatitis disease diagnosis using approximations of sigmoid activation function

Abstract

Objective: Implementation of multilayer neural network (MLNN) with sigmoid activation function for the diagnosis of hepatitis disease. Methods: Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are efficient tools currently in common use for medical diagnosis. In hardware based architectures activation functions play an important role in ANN behavior. Sigmoid function is the most frequently used activation function because of its smooth response. Thus, sigmoid function and its close approximations were implemented as activation function. The dataset is taken from the UCI machine learning database. Results: For the diagnosis of hepatitis disease, MLNN structure was implemented and Levenberg Morquardt (LM) algorithm was used for learning. Our method of classifying hepatitis disease produced an accuracy of 91.9% to 93.8% via 10 fold cross validation. Conclusion: When compared to previous work that diagnosed hepatitis disease using artificial neural networks and the identical data set, our results are promising in order to reduce the size and cost of neural network based hardware. Thus, hardware based diagnosis systems can be developed effectively by using approximations of sigmoid function. Key words: Hepatitis disease diagnosis, multilayer neural network, 10-fold cross validation, approximations of sigmoid activation function