Practical constraints pertinent to the design of neural networks
Said Abdallah, Rufus H. Cofer · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
in designing a feedforward neural network for numerical computation using the backpropagation algorithm it is essential to know that the resulting network has a practical global minimum, meaning that convergence to a stationary solution can be achieved in reasonable time and using a network of reasonable size. This is in contrast to theoretical results indicating that any square-integrable (L2) function can be computed assuming that an unlimited number of neurons are available. A class of problems is discussed that does not fit into this category. Although these problems are conceptually simple, it is shown that in practice convergence to a stationary solution can only be approximate and very costly. Computer simulation results are shown, and concepts are presented that can improve the performance by a careful redesign of the problem.