Decision trees can initialize radial-basis function networks

Successful implementations of radial-basis function (RBF) networks for classification tasks must deal with architectural issues, the burden of irrelevant attributes, scaling, and some other problems. This paper addresses these issues by initializing RBF networks with decision trees that define relatively pure regions in the instance space; each of these regions then determines one basis function. The resulting network is compact, easy to induce, and has favorable classification accuracy.