Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Heterogeneous Radial Basis Function Networks, Tony R. Martinez, D. Randall Wilson

Faculty Publications

Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks typically use a distance function designed for numeric attributes, such as Euclidean or city-block distance. This paper presents a heterogeneous distance function which is appropriate for applications with symbolic attributes, numeric attributes, or both. Empirical results on 30 data sets indicate that the heterogeneous distance metric yields significantly improved generalization accuracy over Euclidean distance in most cases involving symbolic attributes.