Edinburgh Napier University

  Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNNs) have been widely used to solve classification and regression tasks providing satisfactory results. The main issue when working with RBFNNs is how to design them because this task requires the optimization of several parameters such as the number of RBFs, the position of their centers, and their radii. The problem of setting all the previous values presents many local minima so Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are a common solution because of their capability of finding global minima. Two of the most important elements in an EAs are the crossover and the mutation operators. This paper presents a comparison between a non distributed multiobjective algorithm against several parallel approaches that are obtained by the specialisation of the crossover and mutation operators in different islands. The results show how the creation of specialised islands that use different combinations of crossover and mutation operators could lead to a better performance of the algorithm by obtaining better solutions.