Single Dendritic Neural Classification with Functional Weight-enhanced Differential Evolution

As current mainstream deep learning models based on neural networks have been long criticized because of their complex structures, attempts in formulating a single neural model have raised much attention. Owing to the nonlinear information processing ability, dendritic neuron model (DNM) has shown its great potential in classification problems over the past decades. However, designing an effective learning algorithm for training DNM is still an open question due to the issues of local optima trapping and overfiting caused by traditional back-propagation (BP) algorithm. In this study, a novel functional weight-enhanced differential evolutionary algorithm (termed FWDE) is proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. By introducing Gaussian distribution function into weight generation of fitness-distance balance selection strategy, FWDE obtains significantly better classification accuracy with faster convergence speed compared with other representative non-BP and BP algorithms. The experimental results verify the great performance of FWDE, indicating that DNM with an powerful learning algorithm is considerably more effective.