Ensemble of single-layered complex-valued neural networks for classification tasks

This paper presents ensemble approaches in single-layered complex-valued neural network (CVNN) to solve real-valued classification problems. Each component CVNN of an ensemble uses a recently proposed activation function for its complex-valued neurons (CVNs). A gradient-descent based learning algorithm was used to train the component CVNNs. We applied two ensemble methods, negative correlation learning and bagging, to create the ensembles. Experimental results on a number of real-world benchmark problems showed a substantial performance improvement of the ensembles over the individual single-layered CVNN classifiers. Furthermore, the generalization performances were nearly equivalent to those obtained by the ensembles of real-valued multilayer neural networks. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.