Neural network controllers

Neural networks have been used to solve problems in almost all spheres of science and technology. Neural network control basically involves two steps:

System identification Control It has been shown that a feedforward network with nonlinear, continuous and differentiable activation functions have universal approximation capability. Recurrent networks have also been used for system identification. Given, a set of input-output data pairs, system identification aims to form a mapping among these data pairs. Such a network is supposed to capture the dynamics of a system.
The utility of artificial neural network models lies in the fact that they can be used to infer a function from observations and also to use it. Unsupervised neural networks can also be used to learn representations of the input that capture the salient characteristics of the input distribution, e.g., see the Boltzmann machine (1983), and more recently, deep learning algorithms, which can implicitly learn the distribution function of the observed data. Learning in neural networks is particularly useful in applications where the complexity of the data or task makes the design of such functions by hand impractical.

The tasks to which artificial neural networks are applied tend to fall within the following broad categories:

Function approximation, or regression analysis, including time series prediction and modeling. Classification, including pattern and sequence recognition, novelty detection and sequential decision making. Data processing, including filtering, clustering, blind signal separation and compression.

Application areas of ANNs include system identification and control (vehicle

control, process control), game-playing and decision making (backgammon, chess, racing), pattern recognition (radar systems, face identification, object recognition), sequence recognition (gesture, speech, handwritten text recognition), medical diagnosis, financial applications, data mining (or knowledge discovery in databases, "KDD"), visualization and e-mail spam filtering.

Algorithms

trainbfgc can train any network as long as its weight, net input, and transfer functions have derivative functions. Backpropagation is used to calculate derivatives of performance perf with respect to the weight and bias variables X. Each variable is adjusted according to the following: X = X + a*dX;

where dX is the search direction. The parameter a is selected to minimize the performance along the search direction. The line search function searchFcn is used to locate the minimum point. The first search direction is the negative of the gradient of performance. In succeeding iterations the search direction is computed according to the following formula: dX = -H\gX;

where gX is the gradient and H is an approximate Hessian matrix. See page 119 of Gill, Murray, and Wright (Practical Optimization, 1981) for a more detailed discussion of the BFGS quasi-Newton method.

Training stops when any of these conditions occurs:

The maximum number of epochs (repetitions) is reached.

The maximum amount of time is exceeded.

Performance is minimized to the goal.

The performance gradient falls below min_grad.

Precision problems have occurred in the matrix inversion.

Algorithms

trainlm supports training with validation and test vectors if the network's NET.divideFcn property is set to a data division function. Validation vectors are used to stop training early if the network performance on the validation vectors fails to improve or remains the same for max_fail epochs in a row. Test vectors are used as a further check that the network is generalizing well, but do not have any effect on training.

trainlm can train any network as long as its weight, net input, and transfer functions have derivative functions.

Backpropagation is used to calculate the Jacobian jX of performance perf with respect to the weight and bias variables X. Each variable is adjusted according to Levenberg-Marquardt,

jj = jX * jX je = jX * E dX = -(jj+I*mu) \ je

where E is all errors and I is the identity matrix.

The adaptive value mu is increased by mu_inc until the change above results in a reduced performance value. The change is then made to the network and mu is decreased by mu_dec.

The parameter mem_reduc indicates how to use memory and speed to calculate the Jacobian jX. If mem_reduc is 1, then trainlm runs the fastest, but can require a lot of memory. Increasing mem_reduc to 2 cuts some of the memory required by a factor of two, but slows trainlm somewhat. Higher states continue to decrease the amount of memory needed and increase training times.

Training stops when any of these conditions occurs:

The maximum number of epochs (repetitions) is reached.

The maximum amount of time is exceeded.

Performance is minimized to the goal.

The performance gradient falls below min_grad.

mu exceeds mu_max.

Validation performance has increased more than max_fail times since the last time it decreased (when using validation).