Abstract: A hybrid neural network system for object recognition exhibiting local image sampling, a self-organizing map neural network, and a hybrid convolutional neural network. The self-organizing map provides a quantization of the image samples into a topological space where inputs that are nearby in the original space are also nearby in the output space, thereby providing dimensionality reduction and invariance to minor changes in the image sample, and the hybrid convolutional neural network provides for partial invariance to translation, rotation, scale, and deformation. The hybrid convolutional network extracts successively larger features in a hierarchical set of layers. Alternative embodiments using the Karhunen-Loeve transform in place of the self-organizing map, and a multi-layer perceptron in place of the convolutional network are described.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for the prediction of time series data, specifically, the prediction of a foreign currency exchange rate. The method disclosed transforms the time series data into a difference of a series, compresses the transformed data using a log transformation, converts the compressed data into symbols, and subsequently trains one or more neural networks on the symbols such that a prediction is generated. Alternative embodiments demonstrate the conversion by a self-organizing map and training by a recurrent neural network.