COMBINING MULTIPLE NEURAL NETWORKS BY FUZZY INTEGRAL FOR ROBUST CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

Recently, in the area of artificial neural networks, the concept of combining multiple networks has been proposed as a new direction for the development of highly reliable neural network systems. In this paper we propose a method for multinetwork combination based on the fuzzy integral. This technique nonlinearly combines objective evidence, in the form of a fuzzy membership function, with subjective evaluation of the worth of the individual neural networks with respect to the decision. The experimental results with the recognition problem of on-line handwriting characters confirm the superiority of the presented method to the other voting techniques.