The iris flower data (SAS Institute, 1988) were originally published by Fisher (1936) for examples in discriminant analysis and cluster analysis. Four parameters, including sepal length, sepal width, petal length,and petal width, were measured in millimeters on fifty iris specimens from each of three species, Iris setosa, Iris versicolor, and Iris virginica. So given the four parameters, one should be able to determine which of the three species a specimen is categorized to. There are 150 data points listed in the given table. These data are located here.
Develop a back-propagation neural network to classify each iris into the appropriate species. Use the first half of the data as the training set, and the other half as the testing set. Be sure to use the first half of each species for the training data rather than the first half of the entire data set.
Fisher, R.A. 1936. The use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems. Annals of Eugenic, July, 179-188.
SAS Institute. 1988b. SAS/STAT user's Guide, Release 6.03 Edition. SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, U.S.A. 549 p.