Identification of Chinese herbal medicine using artificial neural network in pyrolysis-gas chromatography

The potential utility of feed forward artificial neural network using the back propagation algorithm (BP-ANN), in interpreting pyrogram data from traditional Chinese medicine was discussed. We laid stress on how to extract and encode the most meaningful information from pyrogram to use as the input matrix in neural network,such as data representation and preprocessing. After network topology analysis, several parameters of neural network were optimized. The study revealed, that after training, utilizing principal component analysis (PCA) in conjunction with BP-ANN was robust in respect to small variances presented in data, such as noise and distortion.