Adaptive Mixtures of Local Experts

We present a new supervised learning procedure for systems composed of many separate networks, each of which learns to handle a subset of the complete set of training cases. The new procedure can be viewed either as a modular version of a multilayer supervised network, or as an associative version of competitive learning. It therefore provides a new link between these two apparently different approaches. We demonstrate that the learning procedure divides up a vowel discrimination task into appropriate subtasks, each of which can be solved by a very simple expert network.