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Complexity-penalization strategies are one way to decide on the most appropriate network size in order to address the trade-off between overfitted and underfitted models. In this paper we propose a new penalty term derived from the behaviour of candidate models under noisy conditions that seems to be much more robust against catastrophic overfitting errors that standard techniques. This strategy is applied to several regression problems using polynomial functions, univariate autoregressive models and RBF neural networks. The simulation study at the end of the paper will show that the proposed criterion is extremely competitive when compared to state-of-the-art criteria.

The goal of combining the outputs of multiple models is to form an improved meta-model with higher generalization capability than the best single model used in isolation. Most popular ensemble methods do specify neither the number of component models nor their complexity. However, these parameters strongly influence the generalization capability of the meta-model. In this paper we propose an ensemble method which generates a meta-model with optimal values for these parameters. The proposed method suggests using resampling techniques to generate multiple estimations of the generalization error and multiple comparison procedures to select the models that will be combined to form the meta-model. Experimental results show the performance of the model on regression and classification tasks using artificial and real databases.

One of the main research concern in neural networks is to find the appropriate network size in order to minimize the trade-off between overfitting and poor approximation. In this paper the choice among different competing models that fit to the same data set is faced when statistical methods for model comparison are applied. The study has been conducted to find a range of models that can work all the same as the cost of complexity varies. If they do not, then the generalization error estimates should be about the same among the set of models. If they do, then the estimates should be different and our job would consist on analyzing pairwise differences between the least generalization error estimate and each one of the range, in order to bound the set of models which might result in an equal performance. This method is illustrated applied to polynomial regression and RBF neural networks.