Advanced Topologies
In addition to the basic MLP architecture, several other advanced topologies have been developed in the past few years to meet the needs of different types of applications. Although NN and other soft computing constituents may perform exceptionally well when used individually, the development of practical and efficient intelligent tools may require a synergic integration of several topologies to form hybrid systems. In fact, computational intelligence and soft computing fields have witnessed in the past few decades an intensive research interest towards integrating different computing paradigms such as fuzzy set theory, GAs, and NNs to generate more efficient hybrid systems. The emphasis is placed on the synergistic, rather than the competitive, way the individual tools act to enhance each other’s application domain. The purpose is to provide flexible information processing systems that can exploit the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning, and partial information to achieve tractability, robustness, low-solution cost, and close resemblance with human-like decision making [18].
For example, a combination of neural and fuzzy set, or neuro–fuzzy, model may consolidate the advantages of both techniques. When combined, they can be easily trained and have known properties of convergence and stability as NNs, and they can also provide a certain amount of functional transparency through rule dependency which is important to understand the solution of a problem. NN and GA could be combined to solve optimization problems. In fact, this hybrid approach could be applied using the properties of NN to define the observed functions with unknown shape, and the GA, to obtain the final result of an optimization problem. Examples of advanced and hybrid NN topologies include:
Modular networks,
Coactive neuro–fuzzy inference system (CANFIS),
Recurrent Neural Networks
Jordan–Elman network,
Partially recurrent network (PRN), and
Time-lagged feed-forward network (TLFN).
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