Chapter 5: The Madaline

The Madaline (Many Adaline) is a multilayer extension of the single-neuron bipolar Adaline to a network. It is also due to B. Widrow (1988). Since the Madaline network is a direct multi-layer extension of the Adaline of Sec. 3, we present it before discussing the Back Propagation network that is historically earlier (see our discussion in Sec. 4.4 above). Its weight adjustment methodology is more intuitive than in Back Propagation and provides understanding into the difficulty of adjusting weights in a multi-layer network, though it is less efficient. Its basic structure is given in Fig. 5.1 which is in terms of two layers of Adalines, plus an input layer which merely serves as a network’s input distributor (see Fig. 5.2).