Self-Organizing and Error Driven (SOED) artificial neural network for smarter classifications

Classification tasks are an integral part of science, industry, business, and health care systems; being such a pervasive technique, its smallest improvement is valuable. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is one of the strongest techniques used in many disciplines for classification. The ANN technique suffers from drawbacks such as intransparency in spite of its high prediction power. In this paper, motivated by learning styles in human brains, ANN's shortcomings are assuaged and its prediction power is improved. Self Organizing Map (SOM), an ANN variation which has strong unsupervised power, and Feedforward ANN, traditionally used for classification tasks, are hybridized to solidify their benefits and help remove their limitations. The proposed method, which we name Self-Organizing Error-Driven (SOED) Artificial Neural Network, shows significant improvements in comparison with usual ANNs. We show SOED is a more accurate, more reliable, and more transparent technique through experimentation with five different datasets. (C) 2017 Society for Computational Design and Engineering. Publishing Services by Elsevier.