An experimental study of original and ordered fuzzy ARTMAP neural networks in pattern classification tasks

This paper investigates the effectiveness of an ordering algorithm applied to the supervised fuzzy ARTMAP (FAM) neural network in pattern classification tasks. Before presenting the input patterns to the FAM network (known as ordered FAM), a fixed order of input patterns is first identified using the ordering algorithm. An experimental study is conducted to compare the results from ordered FAM with the average and voting results from the original FAM. In the study, a pool of the original FAM networks is trained using different sequences of input patterns, and the results are averaged. The outputs from various original FAM networks can also be combined using a majority voting strategy to reach a final result. A database comprising various symptoms and measurements of patients suffering from a heart attack is used to evaluate the various schemes of the FAM network in medical pattern classification tasks. The results are compared, analysed, and discussed.