Abstract

We had previously shown that regularization principles lead to approximation schemes which are equivalent to networks with one layer of hidden units, called Regularization Networks. In particular we had discussed how standard smoothness functionals lead to a subclass of regularization networks, the well-known Radial Basis Functions approximation schemes. In this paper weshow that regularization networks encompass amuch broader range of approximation schemes, including many of the popular general additivemodels and some of the neural networks. In particular weintroduce new classes of smoothness functionals that lead to different classes of basis functions. Additive splines as well as some tensor product splines can be obtained from appropriate classes of smoothness functionals. Furthermore, the same extension that leads from Radial Basis Functions (RBF) to Hyper Basis Functions (HBF) also leads from additivemodels to ridge approximation models, containing as special cases Breiman's hinge functions and some forms of Projection Pursuit Regression. We propose to use the term GeneralizedRegularization Networks for this broad class of approximation schemes that follow from an extension of regularization. In the probabilistic interpretation of regularization, the different classes of basis functions correspond to different classes of prior probabilities on the approximating function spaces, and therefore to differenttypes of smoothness assumptions. In the final part of the paper, weshow the relation between activation functions of the Gaussian and sigmoidal type by considering the simple case of the kernel G(x)=jxj.

Citations