A genetic approach to automatic neural network architecture optimization

The use of artificial neural networks for various problems has provided many benefits in various fields of research and engineering. Yet, depending on the problem, different architectures need to be developed and most of the time the design decision relies on a trial and error basis as well as on the experience of the developer. Many approaches have been investigated concerning the topology modelling, training algorithms, data processing. This paper proposes a novel automatic method for the search of a neural network architecture given a specific task. When selecting the best topology, our method allows the exploration of a multidimensional space of possible structures, including the choice of the number of neurons, the number of hidden layers, the types of synaptic connections, and the use of transfer functions. Whereas the backpropagation algorithm is being conventionally used in the field of neural networks, one of the known disadvantages of the technique represents the possibility of the method to reach saddle points or local minima, hence overfitting the output data. In this work, we introduce a novel strategy which is capable to generate a network topology with overfitting being avoided in the majority of the cases at affordable computational cost. In order to validate our method, we provide several numerical experiments and discuss the outcomes.