An efficient method to construct a radial basis function neural network classifier and its application to unconstrained handwritten digit recognition

Radial basis function neural network (RBFN) has the power of the universal function approximation. But how to construct an RBFN to solve a given problem is usually not straightforward. This paper describes a method to construct an RBFN classifier efficiently and effectively. The method determines the middle layer neurons by a fast clustering algorithm and computes the optimal weights between the middle and the output layers statistically. We applied the proposed method to construct an RBFN classifier for an unconstrained handwritten digit recognition. The experiment showed that the method could construct an RBFN classifier quickly and the performance of the classifier was better than the best result previously reported.