Measuring effectiveness of a dynamic artificial neural network algorithm for classification problems

Classification is the process of assigning an object to one of a set of classes based on its attributes. Classification problems have been examined in fields as diverse as biology, medicine, business, image recognition, and forensics. Developing more accurate and widely applicable classification methods has significant implications in these and many other fields.This paper presents a dynamic artificial neural network (DAN2) as an alternate approach for solving classification problems. We show DAN2 to be an effective approach and compare its performance with linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbor algorithms, support vector machines, and traditional artificial neural networks using benchmark and real-world application data sets. These data sets vary in the number of classes (two vs. multiple) and the source of the data (synthetic vs. real-world). We found DAN2 to be a very effective classification method for two-class data sets with accuracy improvements as high as 37.2% when compared to the other methods. We also introduce a hierarchical DAN2 model for multiple class data sets that shows marked improvements (up to 89%) over all other methods, and offers better accuracy in all cases.