A classification approach based on evolutionary neural networks*

Classification is important in data mining and machine learning. In this paper, a classification approach based on evolutionary neural networks (CABEN) is presented, which establishes classifiers by a group of three-layer feed-forward neural networks. The neural networks are trained by an improving algorithm synthesizing modified Evolutionary Strategy and Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method. The class label of the identifying data can first be evaluated by each neural network, and the final classification result is obtained according to the absolute-majority-voting rule. Experimental results show that the algorithm is effective for the classification, and has the better performance in classification precision, comparing with Bayesian and decision trees, especially for the complex classification problems with many classes.