Unsupervised learning in artificial neural networks

Question

If I were to train an artificial neural network's weights using a genetic algorithm what type of learning would this be classed as? I believe it's unsupervised but does it have a name? It seems like it could fall under reinforcement learning but I'm not too sure.

Answer 1

Genetic algorithm itself is an optimization algorithm rather than a learning algorithm. And you probably don't want to ignore the performance of neural network and only consider the weight changes. So what type of learning is a combination of neural network and genetic algorithm depends on the learning type of neural network. A neural network can be used for supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and even unsupervised learning.

It seems such a combination applies more in reinforcement, because genetic algorithm is slower than most backpropagation-based optimization algorithms with gradient information. Updating the weights with genetic algorithm is also called neuroevolution. This post cited many research on neuroevolution over traditional neural network in case you may be interested in.

It is also possible to apply genetic algorithm to unsupervised neural network. In Shibata et al's Nonlinear backlash compensation using recurrent neural network. Unsupervised learning by genetic algorithm, the authors applied the genetic algorithm to determine the weights of the recurrent neural networks, and the approach does not need the teaching signals.