Incorporating prior knowledge in the form of production rules into neural networks using Boolean-like neurons

At present, nearly all neural networks are formulated by learning only from examples or patterns. For a real-word problem, some forms of prior knowledge in a non-example form always exist. Incorporation of prior knowledge will benefit the formulation of neural networks. Prior knowledge could be in several forms. Production rule is one form in which the prior knowledge is frequently represented. This paper proposes an approach to incorporate production rules into neural networks. A newly defined neuron architecture, Boolean-like neuron, is proposed. With this Boolean-like neuron, production rules can be encoded into the neural network during the network initialization period. Experiments are described in this paper. The results show that the incorporation of this prior knowledge can not only increase the training speed, but also the explainability of the neural networks.