Application of Partially Connected Neural Network

This paper focuses mainly on application of Partially Connected Backpropagation Neural Network （PCBP） instead of typical Fully Connected Neural Network （FCBP）. The initial neural network is fully connected, after training with sample data using cross-entropy as error function, a clustering method is employed to cluster weights between inputs to hidden layer and from hidden to output layer, and connections that are relatively unnecessary are deleted, thus the initial network becomes a PCBP network. Then PCBP can be used in prediction or data mining by training PCBP with data that comes from database. At the end of this paper, several experiments are conducted to illustrate the effects of PCBP using Iris data set.