GGA-MLP: A Greedy Genetic Algorithm to Optimize Weights and Biases in Multilayer Perceptron

Abstract

The task of designing an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) can be thought of as an optimization problem that involves many parameters whose optimal value needs to be computed in order to improve the classification accuracy of an ANN. Two of the major parameters that need to be determined during the design of an ANN are weights and biases. Various gradient-based optimization algorithms have been proposed by researchers in the past to generate an optimal set of weights and biases. However, due to the tendency of gradient-based algorithms to get trapped in local minima, researchers have started exploring metaheuristic algorithms as an alternative to the conventional techniques. In this paper, we propose the GGA-MLP (Greedy Genetic Algorithm-Multilayer Perceptron) approach, a learning algorithm, to generate an optimal set of weights and biases in multilayer perceptron (MLP) using a greedy genetic algorithm. The proposed approach increases the performance of the traditional genetic algorithm (GA) by using a greedy approach to generate the initial population as well as to perform crossover and mutation. To evaluate the performance of GGA-MLP in classifying nonlinear input patterns, we perform experiments on datasets of varying complexities taken from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) repository. The experimental results of GGA-MLP are compared with the existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of classification accuracy. The results show that the performance of GGA-MLP is better than or comparable to the existing state-of-the-art techniques.