The effect of weight fault on associative networks

In the past three decades, the properties of associative networks has been extensively investigated. However, most existing results focus on the fault-free networks only. In implementation, network faults can be exhibited in different forms, such as open weight fault and multiplicative weight noise. This paper studies the effect of weight fault on the performance of the bidirectional associative memory (BAM) model when multiplicative weight noise and open weight fault present. Assuming that connection weights are corrupted by these two common fault models, we study how many number of pattern pairs can be stored in a faulty BAM. Since one of important feature of associative network is error correction, we also study the number of pattern pairs can be stored in a faulty BAM when there are some errors in the initial stimulus pattern. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.