Research on an online self-organizing radial basis function neural network

A new growing and pruning algorithm is proposed for radial basis function (RBF) neural network structure design in this paper, which is named as self-organizing RBF (SORBF). The structure of the RBF neural network is introduced in this paper first, and then the growing and pruning algorithm is used to design the structure of the RBF neural network automatically. The growing and pruning approach is based on the radius of the receptive field of the RBF nodes. Meanwhile, the parameters adjusting algorithms are proposed for the whole RBF neural network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through functions approximation and dynamic system identification. Then, the method is used to capture the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) concentration in a wastewater treatment system. Experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient for network structure optimization, and it achieves better performance than some of the existing algorithms.