An improved maximum spread algorithm with application to complex-valued RBF neural networks

It has been known that one of the important steps in training a complex-valued radial basis function neural network is to effectively determine its centers and widths of neurons in the hidden layer. In this paper, an improved maximum spread algorithm is propose to solve this issue. Its basic idea is that the choice of centers not only depends on the distances between samples from different classes, but also is heavily affected by the average distance between samples in the same class. The relationship between external and inner distances is taken into account when determining centers. The performance of this algorithm is tested on several datasets. It is shown that much better performance can be achieved by the developed algorithm than by some existing ones.