Real-Valued Schemata Search Using Statistical Confidence

2 Neural Network & Machine Learning Laboratory Computer Science Department Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602, USA E-mail: [email protected] WWW: http://axon.cs.byu.edu Abstract. Many neural network models must be trained by finding a set of real-valued weights that yield high accuracy on a training set. Other learning models require weights on input attributes that yield high leave-one-out classification accuracy in order to avoid problems associated with irrelevant attributes and high dimensionality. In addition, there are a variety of general problems for which a set of real values must be found which maximize some evaluation function. This paper presents an algorithm for doing a schemata search over a real-valued weight space to find a set of weights (or other real values) that yield high values for a given evaluation function. The algorithm, called the Real-Valued Schemata Search (RVSS), uses the BRACE statistical technique [Moore & Lee, 1993] to determine when to narrow the search space. This paper details the RVSS approach and gives initial empirical results.