Over-fitting avoidance in probabilistic neural networks

In this work, a new training algorithm for probabilistic neural networks (PNN) is presented. The proposed algorithm addresses one of the major drawbacks of probabilistic neural networks, which is the size of the hidden layer in the network. By using a cross-validation training algorithm, the number of hidden neurons is shrunk to a smaller number consisting of the most representative samples of the training set. This is done without affecting the overall architecture of the network. Performance of the new network is compared against performance of standard probabilistic neural networks for different databases from the UCI database repository. Results show an important gain in network size and performance.