M ultivar iable Functional Interpolation and Adaptive N etworks D. S.

Broomhead ' Royal Signals

and Radar Esta blishment, St. Andrews Road, Great Malvern, Wares. WR14 3PS, United
Kingdom David Lowe! Speech Research Unit , Royal Signals and Radar Establish ment, St .
Andrews Road, Great Malvern, Wares. WR14 3PS, United Kingdom A b st r act. The relationship
between "learning" in ad aptive layered networks and the fit ting of data wit h high
dimensional surfaces is discussed . This leads natu rally to a picture of "generalization" in terms
of interp olation between known data points and suggests a rational approach to th e theory of
such networks. A class of adaptive networks is identified which makes the inte rpolation
scheme explicit. This class has the property t hat learning is equivalent to the solution of a set
of linear equations. These netwo rks t hus represent nonlinear relati onships while ha ving a
guaranteed learning rule. 1. I ntroduction The st rong resurgen ce of interest in "se lf-learning
machines", whose anc estors include t he perceptrons of the 1960's, is at least partly driven by
the expectation that they will provi de a new source of algor ithms/architectures for the
processing of complex data. This ex pectation is based on an analogy with connectionis t mo
dels of information processing in animal brains. The brain is able to cope with sophisticated
recog nition and inductive tasks far beyond the capabilit ies of systems based on present
computing logic and ar chi tectures. An example of an everyday task for the human brain which
illustrates th is point, is the recog nition of human speech. For automatic speech recognition
one wishes to deduce properties (the implied message) from t he statistics of a finite input data
set even th ough the speech will be subject to nonlinear •Electro nic mail address from USA:
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