Leaning by Combining Memorization and Gradient Descent

We have created a radial basis function network that allocates a new computational unit whenever an unusual pattern is presented to the network. The network learns by allocating new units and adjusting the parameters of existing units. If the network performs poorly on a presented pattern, then a new unit is allocated which memorizes the response to the presented pattern. If the network performs well on a presented pattern, then the network parameters are updated using standard LMS gradient descent. For predicting the Mackey Glass chaotic time series, our network learns much faster than do those using back-propagation and uses a comparable number of synapses.