A Novel Pruning Algorithm for Optimizing Feedforward Neural Network of Classification Problems

Optimizing the structure of neural networks is an essential step for the discovery of knowledge from data. This paper deals with a new approach which determines the insignificant input and hidden neurons to detect the optimum structure of a feedforward neural network. The proposed pruning algorithm, called as neural network pruning by significance (N2PS), is based on a new significant measure which is calculated by the Sigmoidal activation value of the node and all the weights of its outgoing connections. It considers all the nodes with significance value below the threshold as insignificant and eliminates them. The advantages of this approach are illustrated by implementing it on six different real datasets namely iris, breast-cancer, hepatitis, diabetes, ionosphere and wave. The results show that the proposed algorithm is quite efficient in pruning the significant number of neurons on the neural network models without sacrificing the networks performance.