Constructive Learning Using Internal Representation Conflicts

The first class of network adaptation algorithms start out with a redundant architecture and proceed by pruning away seemingly unimportant weights (Sietsma and Dow, 1988; Le Cun et aI, 1990). A second class of algorithms starts off with a sparse architecture and grows the network to the complexity required by the problem. Several algorithms have been proposed for growing feedforward networks. The upstart algorithm of Frean (1990) and the cascade-correlation algorithm of Fahlman (1990) are examples of this approach.