An Experimental Study of Multi-Layer Multi-Valued Neural Network

Complex numbers are used to represent data in many practical applications such as in telecommunications, image processing, and speech recognition. In this work, we examine the efficiency of complex-valued neural networks and compare that with their real-valued counterpart. Specifically, we examine the performance of neural network with Multi Layer Multi-Valued Neuron (MLMVN) for classification on several benchmark datasets such as Iris and MNIST datasets. It is shown that in applications where complex numbers occur naturally, complex-valued neural networks such as MLMVN network could offer advantages such as more efficient embedding and processing of information over their real-valued counterparts. It is also observed that complex-valued neural networks have a tendency of overfitting especially in applications involving large datasets. Potential solution to the overfitting problem has been discussed.