Evangelos Karvounis

Artificial neural networks are widely established models of computational intelligence that have been tested for their effectiveness in a variety of real-world applications. These models require a set of parameters to be fitted through the use of an optimization technique. However, an issue that researchers often face is finding an efficient range of values for the parameters of the artificial neural network. This paper proposes an innovative technique for generating a promising range of values for the parameters of the artificial neural network. Finding the value field is conducted by a series of rules for partitioning the original set of values or expanding it, the rules of which are generated using grammatical evolution. After finding a promising interval of values, any optimization technique such as a genetic algorithm can be used to train the artificial neural network on that interval of values. The new technique was tested on a wide range of problems from the relevant literature and the results were extremely promising.