Efficient pruning of multilayer perceptrons using a fuzzy sigmoid activation function

This Letter presents a simple and powerful pruning method for multilayer feed forward neural networks based on the fuzzy sigmoid activation function presented in [E. Soria, J. Martín, G. Camps, A. Serrano, J. Calpe, L. Gómez, A low-complexity fuzzy activation function for artificial neural networks, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks 14(6) (2003) 1576–1579]. Successful performance is obtained in standard function approximation and channel equalization problems. Pruning allows to reduce network complexity considerably, achieving a similar performance to that obtained by unpruned networks.