A Constructive Algorithm for Feedforward Neural Networks for Medical Diagnostic Reasoning

Abstract: This research is to search for alternatives to the resolution of complex medical diagnosis where human knowledge should be apprehended in a general fashion. Successful application examples show that human diagnostic capabilities are significantly worse than the neural diagnostic system. Our research describes a constructive neural network algorithm with backpropagation; offer an approach for the incremental construction of nearminimal neural network architectures for pattern classification. The algorithm starts with minimal number of hidden units in the single hidden layer; additional units are added to the hidden layer one at a time to improve the accuracy of the network and to get an optimal size of a neural network. Our algorithm was tested on several benchmarking classification problems including Cancer1, Heart, and Diabetes with good generalization ability.