An experiment in task decomposition and ensembling for a modular artificial neural network

Modular neural networks have the possibility of overcoming common scalability and interference problems experienced by fully connected neural networks when applied to large databases. In this paper we trial an approach to constructing modular ANN's for a very large problem from CEDAR for the classification of handwritten characters. In our approach, we apply progressive task decomposition methods based upon clustering and regression techniques to find modules. We then test methods for combining the modules into ensembles and compare their structural characteristics and classification performance with that of an ANN having a fully connected topology. The results reveal improvements to classification rates as well as network topologies for this problem.