Human chromosome classification using multilayer perceptron neural network.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network (NN) has been studied for human chromosome classification. Only 10-20 examples were required for the MLP NN to reach its ultimate performance classifying chromosomes of 5 types. The empirical dependence of the entropic error on the number of examples was found to be highly comparable to the 1/t function. The principal component analysis (PCA) was used, both for network initialization and for feature reduction purposes. The PCA demonstrated the importance of retaining most of the image information whenever small training sets are used. The MLP NN classifier outperformed the Bayes piecewise classifier for all the cases tested. The MLP classifier was found to be almost unsusceptible to the ratio of the number of training vectors to the number of features, whereas the piecewise classifier was highly dependent on this ratio.