A novel quantum-inspired fuzzy based neural network for data classification

Abstract

The performance of the neural network (NN) depends on the various parameters such as structure, initial weight, number of hidden layer neurons, and learning rate. The improvement in classification performance of NN without changing its structure is a challenging issue. This paper proposes a novel learning model called Quantum-inspired Fuzzy Based Neural Network (Q-FNN) to solve two-class classification problems. In the proposed model, NN architecture is formed constructively by adding neurons in the hidden layer and learning is performed using the concept of Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) clustering, where the fuzziness parameter (m) is evolved using the quantum computing concept. The quantum computing concept provides a large search space for a selection of m, which helps in finding the optimal weights and also optimizes the network architecture. This paper also proposes a modified step activation function for the formation of hidden layer neurons, which handles the overlapping samples belong to different class regions. The performance of the proposed Q-FNN model is superior and competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity on 15 real-world benchmark datasets. © 2013 IEEE.