An improved harmony search-based functional link higher order ANN for nonlinear data classification

Abstract

To obtain the optimal set of weights in any higher order artificial neural network, it is often laborious to adjust the set of weights by using appropriate learning algorithm. In this paper, an improved variant of harmony search (HS), called improved harmony search (IHS) along with gradient descent learning (GDL) is used with functional link artificial neural network (FLANN) for the task of classification in data mining. IHS performs better than HS by eliminating constant parameters [bandwidth (bw), pitch adjustment rate (PAR)] in HS algorithm and incorporating changes dynamically in PAR and bw with iteration. The searching capability of IHS to obtain optimal harmony is used along with GDL to discover optimal set of weights for FLANN model. The proposed IHS-GDL-FLANN is implemented in MATLAB and compared with other alternatives. In order to get statistical correctness of results, the proposed method is analysed by using various statistical analysis under null-hypothesis.