A two-stage algorithm in evolutionary product unit neural networks for classification

This paper presents a procedure to add broader diversity at the beginning of the evolutionary process. It consists of creating two initial populations with different parameter settings, evolving them for a small number of generations, selecting the best individuals from each population in the same proportion and combining them to constitute a new initial population. At this point the main loop of an evolutionary algorithm is applied to the new population. The results show that our proposal considerably improves both the efficiency of previous methodologies and also, significantly, their efficacy in most of the data sets. We have carried out our experimentation on twelve data sets from the UCI repository and two complex real-world problems which differ in their number of instances, features and classes. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.