Process modeling using artificial neural network in the presence of outliers

Outliers, unexpected extraordinary observations that look discordant from most observation in a data set are commonplace in various kinds of data analysis. Since the effect of outliers on model identification could be serious, the aim of this paper is to present some ways of handling outliers in given data set and to specify a model in the presence of outliers. A procedure based on neural network which identifies outliers, removes their effects, and specifies a model for the underlying process is proposed. In contrast with traditional parametric methods requiring to estimate the model's structure and parameters before detecting outliers, the proposed procedure is a nonparametric method without the estimation of model's structure and parameters before handling outliers and could be applied for real problems in the presence of outliers. The proposed methodology is performed as followings. Firstly, outliers are detected and the detected outliers replace the prediction values using outliers detection neural network. The data set removing the effect of outliers is retraining using neural network. Therefore the effects of outliers are removed and the modeling precision can be improved. Experimental results show that the proposed method is suitable for predicting data set in the presence of outliers.