This paper is concerned with the automatic induction of parsimonious neural networks. In contrast to other program induction situations, network induction entails parametric learning as well as structural adaptation. We present a novel representation scheme called neural trees that allows efficient learning of both network architectures and parameters by genetic search. A hybrid evolutionary method is developed for neural tree induction that combines genetic programming and the breeder genetic algorithm under the unified framework of the minimum description length principle. The method is successfully applied to the induction of higher order neural trees while still keeping the resulting structures sparse to ensure good generalization performance. Empirical results are provided on two chaotic time series prediction problems of practical interest.

Genetic programming is distinguished from other evolutionary algorithms in that it uses tree representations of variable size instead of linear strings of fixed length. The flexible representation scheme is very important because it allows the underlying structure of the data to be discovered automatically. One primary difficulty, however, is that the solutions may grow too big without any improvement of their generalization ability. In this article we investigate the fundamental relationship between the performance and complexity of the evolved structures. The essence of the parsimony problem is demonstrated empirically by analyzing error landscapes of programs evolved for neural network synthesis. We consider genetic programming as a statistical inference problem and apply the Bayesian model-comparison framework to introduce a class of fitness functions with error and complexity terms. An adaptive learning method is then presented that automatically balances the model-complexity factor to evolve parsimonious programs without losing the diversity of the population needed for achieving the desired training accuracy. The effectiveness of this approach is empirically shown on the induction of sigma-pi neural networks for solving a real-world medical diagnosis problem as well as benchmark tasks.