With the rapid development of artificial neural networks, recent studies have shown that dendrites play a vital role in neural computations. In this study, we propose a dendritic neuron model called the approximate logic dendritic neuron model (ALDNM) to solve classification problems. The ALDNM can be divided into four layers: the synaptic layer, the dendritic layer, the membrane layer, and the soma body. Considering the limitation of the back-propagation (BP) algorithm, we employ a heuristic optimization called the social learning particle swarm optimization algorithm (SL-PSO) to train the ALDNM. In order to investigate the effectiveness of SL-PSO for training the ALDNM, we compare this training method with BP and four other typical heuristic optimization methods. Moreover, the proposed ALDNM is also compared with seven classifiers to verify its performance. The experimental results and statistical analysis on four classification problems indicate that the proposed ALDNM trained by SL-PSO can provide a competitive performance for solving the classification problems. It is worth emphasizing that the structure of the trained ALDNM can be greatly simplified owing to the unique pruning operations. Furthermore, the simplified ALDNM for a specific problem can be converted into a corresponding logic circuit classifier for a fast classification.

Recent neurological studies have shown the importance of dendrites in neural computation. In this paper, a neuron model with dendrite morphology, called the logic dendritic neuron model (LDNM), is proposed for classification. This model consists of four layers: a synaptic layer, a dendritic layer, a membrane layer, and a soma body. After training, the LDNM is simplified by proprietary pruning mechanisms and is further transformed into a logic circuit classifier. Moreover, to address the high-dimensional challenge, feature selection is employed as the dimension reduction method before training the LDNM. In addition, the effort of employing a heuristic optimization algorithm as the learning method is also undertaken to speed up the convergence. Finally, the performance of the proposed model is assessed by five benchmark high-dimensional classification problems. In comparison with the other six classical classifiers, LDNM achieves the best classification performance on two (out of five) classification problems. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. A new perspective for solving classification problems by the proposed LDNM is provided in the paper.