Orthogonality of decision boundaries in complex-valued neural networks

This letter presents some results of an analysis on the decision boundaries of complex-valued neural networks whose weights, threshold values, input and output signals are all complex numbers. The main results may be summarized as follows. (1) A decision boundary of a single complex-valued neuron consists of two hypersurfaces that intersect orthogonally, and divides a decision region into four equal sections. The XOR problem and the detection of symmetry problem that cannot be solved with two-layered real-valued neural networks, can be solved by two-layered complex-valued neural networks with the orthogonal decision boundaries, which reveals a potent computational power of complex-valued neural nets. Furthermore, the fading equalization problem can be successfully solved by the two-layered complex-valued neural network with the highest generalization ability. (2) A decision boundary of a three-layered complex-valued neural network has the orthogonal property as a basic structure, and its two hypersurfaces approach orthogonality as all the net inputs to each hidden neuron grow. In particular, most of the decision boundaries in the three-layered complex-valued neural network inetersect orthogonally when the network is trained using Complex-BP algorithm. As a result, the orthogonality of the decision boundaries improves its generalization ability. (3) The average of the learning speed of the Complex-BP is several times faster than that of the Real-BP. The standard deviation of the learning speed of the Complex-BP is smaller than that of the Real-BP. It seems that the complex-valued neural network and the related algorithm are natural for learning complex-valued patterns for the above reasons.