Maximum local density-driven non-overlapping radial basis function support kernel neural network

The learning and optimization of kernels in the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) are crucial. However, in existing methods, there are issues of overfitting when learning kernel parameters. The learned kernels are also sensitive to outliers. This paper proposes a general kernel learning strategy for RBFNN called non-overlapping maximum local density support kernel learning (MLD-SKL), which contains two modules, the non-overlapping maximum local density (MLD) kernel learning module and support kernel learning (SKL) module. In the MLD kernel learning stage, the candidate set of kernels is incrementally determined based on the local density of samples. Meanwhile, it is required that the coverage ranges of kernels from different classes do not overlap with each other. This module is effective in reducing the impact of outliers. In the SKL stage, kernel importance indicator is defined to measure the importance of kernels. The learned support kernels are utilized to construct a maximum local density-driven non-overlapping radial basis function support kernel neural network (MLD-RBFSKNN). The RBFNN constructed through MLD-SKL exhibits a more compact structure. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed MLD-RBFSKNN improves accuracy in recognition task. Furthermore, while achieving superior recognition performance, the final constructed network also has the minimum number of kernels.