Abstract & Overview
Neural networks have been very important models across computer vision, natural language processing, speech and image recognition, aircraft safety and many more. It uses a variety of architectures that centres on the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) which is the most commonly used type of Artificial Neural Network. MLP has been found to be good in terms of model precision in the usage of Homogenous Transfer/activation Functions (HTFs), especially with large data set. Based on the preliminary investigations of ranking of transfer functions by error variance (Udomboso, 2014), three HTFs are considered to perform better than other HTFs in prediction. These HTFs are the Hyperbolic Tangent Transfer functions (TANH), Hyperbolic Tangent Sigmoid Transfer function (TANSIG) and the Symmetric Saturating Linear Transfer Function (SSLTF). In this work, the performance of two Heterogeneous Transfer Functions (HETFs), which came as a result of the convolution of the three best HTFs, were compared with the performance of the three above listed HTFs. The hidden neurons used are 2, 5 and 10, while the sample sizes include 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000. The data were divided into training sets of 90, 80 and 70 respectively. The results showed that the HETFs performed better in terms of the forecast using Mean Square Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Test Error as the forecast prediction criteria.