Title: Research on artificial neural networks with spatial architecture based on span connection and lateral inhibition mechanism

Authors: Gang Yang, Jun-Fei Qiao, Ying-Chun Bo

Addresses: Intelligent Systems Institute, College of Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China. ' Intelligent Systems Institute, College of Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China. ' Intelligent Systems Institute, College of Electronic and Control Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China

Abstract: Motivated by the knowledge of biological neural system being an asymmetry three dimensional structure and the effect of inhibition within cerebral cortex, we propose a novel topology of artificial neural network called spatial artificial neural network (SANN), which includes two types of processing networks: basic network and spatial connection network. The basic network introduces the lateral inhibition mechanism between hidden units and realises the competition in neurons. The spatial connection means that any two neurons in SANN may have random and long-range connectivity. Supervised learning rules for synaptic weights update are derived from the steepest descent gradient, and the descent gradient with momentum (GDM) is used for network learning. From the experimental analysis of benchmark problems such as pattern recognition, non-linear function approximation, we prove the powerful representation capability and generalisation performance of SANN network.

Keywords: artificial neural networks; spatial ANNs; SANNs; spatial architecture; span connection; lateral inhibition mechanism; supervised learning; pattern recognition; nonlinear function approximation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2011.041216

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2011 Vol.6 No.1/2, pp.86 - 95

Published online: 18 Mar 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article