Adaptive linear and normalized combination of radial basis function networks for function approximation and regression

This paper presents a novel adaptive linear and normalized combination (ALNC) method that can be used to combine the component radial basis function networks (RBFNs) to implement better function approximation and regression tasks. The optimization of the fusion weights is obtained by solving a constrained quadratic programming problem. According to the instantaneous errors generated by the component RBFNs, the ALNC is able to perform the selective ensemble of multiple leaners by adaptively adjusting the fusion weights from one instance to another. The results of the experiments on eight synthetic function approximation and six benchmark regression data sets show that the ALNC method can effectively help the ensemble system achieve a higher accuracy (measured in terms of mean-squared error) and the better fidelity (characterized by normalized correlation coefficient) of approximation, in relation to the popular simple average, weighted average, and the Bagging methods.