Hybrid Wolf-Bat Algorithm for Optimization of Connection Weights in Multi-layer Perceptron

In a neural network, the weights act as parameters to determine the output(s) from a set of inputs. The weights are used to find the activation values of nodes of a layer from the values of the previous layer. Finding the ideal set of these weights for training a Multi-layer Perceptron neural network such that it minimizes the classification error is a widely known optimization problem. The presented article proposes a Hybrid Wolf-Bat algorithm, a novel optimization algorithm, as a solution to solve the discussed problem. The proposed algorithm is a hybrid of two already existing nature-inspired algorithms, Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm and Bat algorithm. The novel introduced approach is tested on ten different datasets of the medical field, obtained from the UCI machine learning repository. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the recently developed nature-inspired algorithms: Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm, Cuckoo Search, Bat Algorithm, and Whale Optimization Algorithm, along with the standard Back-propagation training method available in the literature. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other bio-inspired algorithms in terms of both speed of convergence and accuracy.