Improved probabilistic neural networks with self-adaptive strategies for transformer fault diagnosis problem

Probabilistic neural network has successfully solved all kinds of engineering problems in various fields since it is proposed. In probabilistic neural network, Spread has great influence on its performance, and probabilistic neural network will generate bad prediction results if it is improperly selected. It is difficult to select the optimal manually. In this article, a variant of probabilistic neural network with self-adaptive strategy, called self-adaptive probabilistic neural network, is proposed. In self-adaptive probabilistic neural network, Spread can be self-adaptively adjusted and selected and then the best selected Spread is used to guide the self-adaptive probabilistic neural network train and test. In addition, two simplified strategies are incorporated into the proposed self-adaptive probabilistic neural network with the aim of further improving its performance and then two versions of simplified self-adaptive probabilistic neural network (simplified self-adaptive probabilistic neural networks 1 and 2) are proposed. The variants of self-adaptive probabilistic neural networks are further applied to solve the transformer fault diagnosis problem. By comparing them with basic probabilistic neural network, and the traditional back propagation, extreme learning machine, general regression neural network, and self-adaptive extreme learning machine, the results have experimentally proven that self-adaptive probabilistic neural networks have a more accurate prediction and better generalization performance when addressing the transformer fault diagnosis problem.