To improve the global search ability and imaging quality of electrical resistivity imaging(ERI) inversion, a two-stage learning ICPSO algorithm of radial basis function neural network(RBFNN) based on information criterion(IC) and particle swarm optimization(PSO) is presented. In the proposed method, IC is applied to obtain the hidden layer structure by calculating the optimal IC value automatically and PSO algorithm is used to optimize the centers and widths of the radial basis functions in the hidden layer. Meanwhile, impacts of different information criteria to the inversion results are compared, and an implementation of the proposed ICPSO algorithm is given. The optimized neural network has one hidden layer with 261 nodes selected by AKAIKE's information criterion(AIC) and it is trained on 32 data sets and tested on another 8 synthetic data sets. Two complex synthetic examples are used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method with two learning stages. The results show that the proposed method has better performance and higher imaging quality than three-layer and four-layer back propagation neural networks(BPNNs) and traditional least square(LS) inversion.
