Self-organized hybrid fuzzy neural networks driven with the aid of probability-based node selection and enhanced input strategy

Abstract

Polynomial neural network (PNN) is a flexible self-organizing network model, and there have been lots of improvements to it. However, various and improved models of PNN do not properly balance their performance and efficiency. In this study, we present novel self-organized hybrid fuzzy neural networks (SHFNN). The purpose of this study is to develop a new design methodology of constructing a hybrid fuzzy model through enhanced input strategy (EIS) and probability-based node selection (PNS) to reinforce the performance of the model without sacrificing efficiency. l2-norm regularization (l2) is utilized to mitigate overfitting as well as enhance generalization capability. The key points of SHFNN can be summarized as follows. First, a hybrid network structure is constructed by combining fuzzy radial basis function neural networks (FRBFNN) and PNN. Second, we propose a probability-based node selection strategy for node (neuron) selection. Third, an enhanced input strategy (EIS) is proposed to design the enhanced input set by merging the general candidate input set (GCIS) and the original candidate input set (OCIS). The regularization coefficient estimation method based on l2 is used in conjunction with EIS and PNS to improve the performance and enhance the stability of the model. The effectiveness of SHFNN is validated using synthetic and machine learning dataset. The experimental results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is improved by 4–22% when compared with some methods reported in the literature. Statistical analysis is also considered to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.