A hybrid radial basis function and data envelopment analysis neural network for classification

We propose a hybrid radial basis function network-data envelopment analysis (RBFN-DEA) neural network for classification problems. The procedure uses the radial basis function to map low dimensional input data from input space ℜ to a high dimensional ℜ⁺ feature space where DEA can be used to learn the classification function. Using simulated datasets for a non-linearly separable binary classification problem, we illustrate how the RBFN-DEA neural network can be used to solve it. We also show how asymmetric misclassification costs can be incorporated in the hybrid RBFN-DEA model. Our preliminary experiments comparing the RBFN-DEA with feed forward and probabilistic neural networks show that the RBFN-DEA fares very well.