Stacking MF Networks to Combine the Outputs Provided by RBF Networks

The performance of a Radial Basis Functions network (RBF) can be increased with the use of an ensemble of RBF networks because the RBF networks are successfully applied to solve classification problems and they can be trained by gradient descent algorithms. Reviewing the bibliography we can see that the performance of ensembles of Multilayer Feedforward (MF) networks can be improved by the use of the two combination methods based on Stacked Generalization described in [1]. We think that we could get a better classification system if we applied these combiners to an RBF ensemble. In this paper we satisfactory apply these two new methods, Stacked and Stacked+, on ensembles of RBF networks. Increasing the number of networks used in the combination module is also successfully proposed in this paper. The results show that training 3 MF networks to combine an RBF ensemble is the best alternative.