About SNARLI
SNARLI (Simple Neural
ARchitecture LIbrary) is a Java package
containing the folloing classes:
- BPLayer, a general back-prop layer class
- IGG, a class for Fritzke's Incremental Growing Grid
- SOM, a class for Kohonen's Self-Organizing (Feature) Map
- Map2D, an abstract class for these sorts of maps
BPLayer also supports sigma-pi connections and back-prop-through-time,
allowing you to build just about any kind of back-prop network found
in the literature.
SNARLI differs from existing neural-net packages in two
important ways: First, it is not GUI-based. Instead, it is meant as a
code resource that can be linked directly to new or existing
Java-based projects, for those who want to try a neural-network
approach without having to write a lot of new code. Given the variety of
platforms that currently interface to Java, from HTML to
Matlab, it made more sense to me
to focus on the neural net algorithms, and leave the GUI development to
others.
Second, SNARLI gets a great deal of mileage out of a single class
(BPLayer), instead of adding a new class for each type of network.
Using this class, my students and I have been able to construct a
large variety of back-prop networks, from simple perceptrons through
Pollack's
RAAM,
with very little additional coding. We have used
these networks successfully in
coursework ,
thesis projects,
and
research.
Future versions of SNARLI may include classes to support other
popular architectures, such as
Support Vector Machines
(SVMs),
Hopfield Nets,
and
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), as user
interest
dictates.