Input Noise Immunity of Multilayer Perceptrons

Abstract

In this paper, the robustness of the artificial neural networks to noise is demonstrated with a multilayer perceptron, and the reason of robustness is due to the statistical orthogonality among hidden nodes and its hierarchical information extraction capability. Also, the misclassification probability of a well-trained multilayer perceptron is derived without any linear approximations when the inputs are contaminated with random noises. The misclassification probability for a noisy pattern is shown to be a function of the input pattern, noise variances, the weight matrices, and the nonlinear transformations. The result is verified with a handwritten digit recognition problem, which shows better result than that using linear approximations.