An efficient MDL-based construction of RBF networks

We propose a method for optimizing the complexity of Radial basis function (RBF) networks. The method involves two procedures: adaptation (training) and selection. The first procedure adaptively changes the locations and the width of the basis functions and trains the linear weights. The selection procedure performs the elimination of the redundant basis functions using an objective function based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. By iteratively combining these two procedures we achieve a controlled way of training and modifying RBF networks, which balances accuracy, training time, and complexity of the resulting network. We test the proposed method on function approximation and classification tasks, and compare it with some other recently proposed methods. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.