Automatic Generation of Neural Networks

This work deals with methods for finding optimal neural network architectures to learn par-ticular problems. A genetic algorithm is used to discover suitable domain specific architectures; this evolutionary algorithm applies direct codification and uses the error from the trained network as a per-formance measure to guide the evolution. The network training is accomplished by the back-propagation algorithm; techniques such as training repetition, early stopping and complex regulation are employed to improve the evolutionary process results. The evaluation criteria are based on learn-ing skills and classification accuracy of generated architecture