Mixed transfer function neural networks for knowledge acquisition

Modeling helps to understand and predict the outcome of complex systems. Inductive modeling methodologies are beneficial for modeling the systems where the uncertainties involved in the system do not permit to obtain an accurate physical model. However inductive models, like Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), may suffer from a few drawbacks involving over-fitting and the difficulty to easily understand the model itself. This can result in user reluctance to accept the model or even complete rejection of the modeling results. Thus, it becomes highly desirable to make such inductive models more comprehensible and to automatically determine the model complexity to avoid over-fitting. In this paper, we propose a novel type of ANN, a Mixed Transfer Function Artificial Neural Network (MTFANN), which aims to improve the complexity fitting and comprehensibility of the most popular type of ANN (MLP - a Multilayer Perceptron).