An empirically-sourced heuristic for predetermining the size of the hidden layer of a multi-layer perceptron for large datasets

We recommend a guiding heuristic to locate a sufficiently-sized multilayer perceptron (MLP) for larger datasets. Expected to minimise the search scope, it is based on experimental research into the comparative performance of 14 existing approaches with global minimum ranges on 31 larger datasets. The most consistent performer was Baum’s equation that sets the number of hidden neurons equal to the square root of the number of training instances.