2,419 research outputs found
Comparing Information-Theoretic Measures of Complexity in Boltzmann Machines
In the past three decades, many theoretical measures of complexity have been
proposed to help understand complex systems. In this work, for the first time,
we place these measures on a level playing field, to explore the qualitative
similarities and differences between them, and their shortcomings.
Specifically, using the Boltzmann machine architecture (a fully connected
recurrent neural network) with uniformly distributed weights as our model of
study, we numerically measure how complexity changes as a function of network
dynamics and network parameters. We apply an extension of one such
information-theoretic measure of complexity to understand incremental Hebbian
learning in Hopfield networks, a fully recurrent architecture model of
autoassociative memory. In the course of Hebbian learning, the total
information flow reflects a natural upward trend in complexity as the network
attempts to learn more and more patterns.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures; Appears in Entropy, Special Issue "Information
Geometry II
Information-Geometric Optimization Algorithms: A Unifying Picture via Invariance Principles
We present a canonical way to turn any smooth parametric family of
probability distributions on an arbitrary search space into a
continuous-time black-box optimization method on , the
\emph{information-geometric optimization} (IGO) method. Invariance as a design
principle minimizes the number of arbitrary choices. The resulting \emph{IGO
flow} conducts the natural gradient ascent of an adaptive, time-dependent,
quantile-based transformation of the objective function. It makes no
assumptions on the objective function to be optimized.
The IGO method produces explicit IGO algorithms through time discretization.
It naturally recovers versions of known algorithms and offers a systematic way
to derive new ones. The cross-entropy method is recovered in a particular case,
and can be extended into a smoothed, parametrization-independent maximum
likelihood update (IGO-ML). For Gaussian distributions on , IGO
is related to natural evolution strategies (NES) and recovers a version of the
CMA-ES algorithm. For Bernoulli distributions on , we recover the
PBIL algorithm. From restricted Boltzmann machines, we obtain a novel algorithm
for optimization on . All these algorithms are unified under a
single information-geometric optimization framework.
Thanks to its intrinsic formulation, the IGO method achieves invariance under
reparametrization of the search space , under a change of parameters of the
probability distributions, and under increasing transformations of the
objective function.
Theory strongly suggests that IGO algorithms have minimal loss in diversity
during optimization, provided the initial diversity is high. First experiments
using restricted Boltzmann machines confirm this insight. Thus IGO seems to
provide, from information theory, an elegant way to spontaneously explore
several valleys of a fitness landscape in a single run.Comment: Final published versio
Discriminative conditional restricted Boltzmann machine for discrete choice and latent variable modelling
Conventional methods of estimating latent behaviour generally use attitudinal
questions which are subjective and these survey questions may not always be
available. We hypothesize that an alternative approach can be used for latent
variable estimation through an undirected graphical models. For instance,
non-parametric artificial neural networks. In this study, we explore the use of
generative non-parametric modelling methods to estimate latent variables from
prior choice distribution without the conventional use of measurement
indicators. A restricted Boltzmann machine is used to represent latent
behaviour factors by analyzing the relationship information between the
observed choices and explanatory variables. The algorithm is adapted for latent
behaviour analysis in discrete choice scenario and we use a graphical approach
to evaluate and understand the semantic meaning from estimated parameter vector
values. We illustrate our methodology on a financial instrument choice dataset
and perform statistical analysis on parameter sensitivity and stability. Our
findings show that through non-parametric statistical tests, we can extract
useful latent information on the behaviour of latent constructs through machine
learning methods and present strong and significant influence on the choice
process. Furthermore, our modelling framework shows robustness in input
variability through sampling and validation
The Ambiguity of Simplicity
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented
classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum
physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture,
emphasize, and express different properties and mechanisms. What is surprising
is that, as we demonstrate, simplicity is ambiguous: the relative simplicity
between two systems can change sign when moving between classical and quantum
descriptions. Thus, notions of absolute physical simplicity---minimal structure
or memory---at best form a partial, not a total, order. This suggests that
appeals to principles of physical simplicity, via Ockham's Razor or to the
"elegance" of competing theories, may be fundamentally subjective, perhaps even
beyond the purview of physics itself. It also raises challenging questions in
model selection between classical and quantum descriptions. Fortunately,
experiments are now beginning to probe measures of simplicity, creating the
potential to directly test for ambiguity.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/aos.ht
- …