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- Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!destroyer!ubc-cs!unixg.ubc.ca!kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca!alberta!arms
- From: arms@cs.UAlberta.CA (Bill Armstrong)
- Subject: Re: neural nets and generalization (was Why not trees?)
- Message-ID: <arms.711990060@spedden>
- Sender: news@cs.UAlberta.CA (News Administrator)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: spedden.cs.ualberta.ca
- Organization: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
- References: <arms.711643374@spedden> <4458@rosie.NeXT.COM>
- Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 15:01:00 GMT
- Lines: 30
-
- paulking@next.com (Paul King) writes:
-
- >Hidden units are interesting because they occasionally converge
- >on an intermediate representation that highlights regularities
- >in the behavior of the black box. These intermediate states can
- >then be used as inferred information about internal states of the
- >black box, which can be useful as inputs to further networks.
-
- >As an example, consider handwriting recognition. Mapping input
- >drawings to target characters might result in hidden-units that
- >correlate with subfeatures in the input drawings. This ability
- >to map input drawings to subfeatures might then benefit a higher-level
- >system that maps subfeatures to words, bypassing the character
- >representation altogether. One now has a network that can recognize
- >words even if certain letters are incompletely written.
-
- I agree that discovery of subfeatures is useful, but how much extra
- interconnection is required -- complete connections to all elements in
- the preceding layer? If you cut down on the number of connections, you
- cut the time of executing the net. Go too far -- and you eliminate the
- possibility of finding subfeatures that are shared.
-
- Maybe the only remaining question is how many connections should be set
- up initially to do this optimally.
-
- --
- ***************************************************
- Prof. William W. Armstrong, Computing Science Dept.
- University of Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2H1
- arms@cs.ualberta.ca Tel(403)492 2374 FAX 492 1071
-