Efficient Partition of Learning Data Sets for Neural Network Training.

This study investigates the emerging possibilities of combining unsupervised and supervised learning in neural network ensembles. Such strategy is used to get an efficient partition of a noisy input data set in order to focus the training of neural networks on the most complex and informative domains of the data set and accelerate the learning phase. The proposed algorithm provides a good prediction accuracy using fewer cases from non-informative domains according to a correlative measure of dependency between cases of the training set. This measure takes into account internal relationships amid analyzed data and can be used to cluster neighbor cases in a multidimensional space and to filter out the outliers. The possible relation of the proposed algorithm to brain processing occurring in the thalamo-cortical pathway is discussed.