Incremental learning with rule-based neural networks

A classifier for discrete-valued variable classification problems is presented. The system utilizes an information-theoretic algorithm for constructing informative rules from example data. These rules are then used to construct a neural network to perform parallel inference and posterior probability estimation. The network can be grown incrementally, so that new data can be incorporated without repeating the training on previous data. It is shown that this technique performs as well as other techniques such as backpropagation while having unique advantages in incremental learning capability, training efficiency, knowledge representation, and hardware implementation suitability.