Fast unit pruning algorithm for feedforward neural network design

A fast unit pruning algorithm for feedforward neural network is presented and the way used by the algorithm which based on optimal brain surgeon (OBS) is to remove the unneeded hidden units directly so that carry out the self-organization design on the architecture of neural networks. The algorithm is tested on several modeling problems, and is compared with OBS. It is found that the fast unit pruning algorithm is much more efficient than OBS which can not only reduce the complexity of the network but also accelerate the learning speed.