Accelerating the Multilayer Perceptron Learning with the Davidon Fletcher Powell Algorithm

In this paper, the Davidon Fletcher Powell (DFP) algorithm for nonlinear least squares is proposed to train multilayer perceptron (MLP). Applied on both a single output layer perceptron and MLP, we find that this algorithm is faster than the Marquardt-Levenberg (ML) algorithm known as the fastest algorithm used to train MLP until now. The number of iterations required by DFP algorithm to converge is less than about 50% of what is required by the ML algorithm. Interpretations of these results are provided in the paper.