Feedforward neural network with multi-valued connection weights

This paper introduces a new concept of the connection weight to the multi-layer feedforward neural network. The architecture of the proposed approach is the same as that of the original multi-layer feedforward neural network. However, the weight of each connection is multi-valued, depending on the value of the input data involved. The backpropagation learning algorithm was also modified to suit the proposed concept. This proposed model has been benchmarked against the original feedforward neural network and the radial basis function network. The results on six benchmark problems are very encouraging. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.