Evolutionary neural network learning

Several gradient-based methods have been developed for Artificial Neural Network (ANN) training. Still, in some situations, such procedures may lead to local minima, making Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) a promising alternative. In this work, EAs using direct representations are applied to several classification and regression ANN learning tasks. Furthermore, EAs are also combined with local optimization, under the Lamarckian framework. Both strategies are compared with conventional training methods. The results reveal an enhanced performance by a macro-mutation based Lamarckian approach