Abstract
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are one of the hottest topics in computer science and artificial intelligence due to their potential and advantages in analyzing real-world problems in various disciplines, including but not limited to physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. However, ANNs lack several key characteristics of biological neural networks, such as sparsity, scale-freeness, and small-worldness. The concept of sparse and scale-free neural networks has been introduced to fill this gap. Network sparsity is implemented by removing weak weights between neurons during the learning process and replacing them with random weights. When the network is initialized, the neural network is fully connected, which means the number of weights is four times the number of neurons. In this study, considering that a biological neural network has some degree of initial sparsity, we design an ANN with a prescribed level of initial sparsity. The neural network is tested on handwritten digits, Arabic characters, CIFAR-10, and Reuters newswire topics. Simulations show that it is possible to reduce the number of weights by up to 50% without losing prediction accuracy. Moreover, in both cases, the testing time is dramatically reduced compared with fully connected ANNs.