How to convert the output of an artificial neural network into probabilities?

Question

I\'ve read about neural network a little while ago and I understand how an ANN (especially a multilayer perceptron that learns via backpropagation) can learn to classify an

Answer 1

did you try prof. Hinton's suggestion of training the network with softmax activation function and cross entropy error?

as an example create a three layer network with the following:

linear neurons   [ number of features ]
sigmoid neurons [ 3 x number of features ]
linear neurons   [ number of classes ]

then train them with cross entropy error softmax transfer with your favourite optimizer stochastic descent/iprop plus/ grad descent. After training the output neurons should be normalized to sum of 1.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_activation_function for details. Shark Machine Learning framework does provide Softmax feature through combining two models. And prof. Hinton an excellent online course @ http://coursera.com regarding the details.