Hierarchical genetic algorithm based neural network design

In this paper, we propose a novel genetic algorithm based design procedure for multi-layer feedforward neural network. Hierarchical genetic algorithm is used to evolve both neural network topology and parameters. Compared with traditional genetic algorithm based designs for neural network, the proposed hierarchical approach addressed several deficiencies highlighted in literature. A multi-objective function is used herein to optimize the performance and topology of the evolved neural network. Two benchmark problems are successfully verified and the proposed algorithm proves to be competitive or even superior to the traditional back-propagation network in Mackey-Glass chaotic time series prediction.