Study on the Effect of Discrepancy of Training Sample Population in Neural Network Classification

Neural networks have been focused on as a robust classifier for the remotely sensed imagery due to its statistical independency and teaming ability. Also the artificial neural networks have been reported to be more tolerant to noise and missing data. However, unlike the conventional statistical classifiers which use the statistical parameters for the classification, a neural network classifier uses individual training sample in teaming stage. The training performance of a neural network is know to be very sensitive to the discrepancy of the number of the training samples of each class. In this paper, the effect of the population discrepancy of training samples of each class was analyzed with three layered feed forward network. And a method for reducing the effect was proposed and experimented with Landsat TM image. The results showed that the effect of the training sample size discrepancy should be carefully considered for faster and more accurate training of the network. Also, it was found that the proposed method which makes teaming rate as a function of the number of training samples in each class resulted in faster and more accurate training of the network.