A Normalization Methods for Backpropagation: A Comparative Study

Neural Networks (NN) have been used by many researchers to solve problems in several domains including classification and pattern recognition, and Backpropagation (BP) which is one of the most well-known artificial neural network models. Constructing effective NN applications relies on some characteristics such as the network topology, learning parameter, and normalization approaches for the input and the output vectors. The Input and the output vectors for BP need to be normalized properly in order to achieve the best performance of the network. This paper applies several normalization methods on several UCI datasets and comparing between them to find the best normalization method that works better with BP. Norm, Decimal scaling, Mean-Man, Median-Mad, Min-Max, and Z-score normalization are considered in this study. The comparative study shows that the performance of Mean-Mad and Median-Mad is better than the all remaining methods. On the other hand, the worst result is produced with Norm method.