Recall Network: A Simple Brain-Inspired Algorithm for Classification

The latest development of neuroscience has deepened the understanding of the information-processing mechanisms in the human brain and inspired a couple of sophisticated computational methods, such as deep learning, memory networks, and hierarchical temporal memory. However, it remains a challenge to explore simpler models due to the high computational cost of the above-mentioned methods. This paper proposes recall network (RN), an intuitive and simple model, that initializes itself by constructing the network path derived from the correlation of features in the training dataset and then makes classification decisions by recalling the paths that are relevant to the features in the test set. The algorithm has been applied to 263 datasets available from UCI Machine Learning Repository, and the classification results of repeated 10-fold cross-validation experiments on Weka demonstrate its competitive performance with prestigious classification algorithms, such as ANN, J48, and KNN.