Entropy of Overcomplete Kernel Dictionaries

In signal analysis and synthesis, linear approximation theory considers a linear decomposition of any given signal in a set of atoms, collected into a so-called dictionary. Relevant sparse representations are obtained by relaxing the orthogonality condition of the atoms, yielding overcomplete dictionaries with an extended number of atoms. More generally than the linear decomposition, overcomplete kernel dictionaries provide an elegant nonlinear extension by defining the atoms through a mapping kernel function (e.g., the gaussian kernel). Models based on such kernel dictionaries are used in neural networks, gaussian processes and online learning with kernels. The quality of an overcomplete dictionary is evaluated with a diversity measure the distance, the approximation, the coherence and the Babel measures. In this paper, we develop a framework to examine overcomplete kernel dictionaries with the entropy from information theory. Indeed, a higher value of the entropy is associated to a further uniform spread of the atoms over the space. For each of the aforementioned diversity measures, we derive lower bounds on the entropy. Several definitions of the entropy are examined, with an extensive analysis in both the input space and the mapped feature space.Comment: 10 page

Extreme Entropy Machines: Robust information theoretic classification

Most of the existing classification methods are aimed at minimization of empirical risk (through some simple point-based error measured with loss function) with added regularization. We propose to approach this problem in a more information theoretic way by investigating applicability of entropy measures as a classification model objective function. We focus on quadratic Renyi's entropy and connected Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence which leads to the construction of Extreme Entropy Machines (EEM). The main contribution of this paper is proposing a model based on the information theoretic concepts which on the one hand shows new, entropic perspective on known linear classifiers and on the other leads to a construction of very robust method competetitive with the state of the art non-information theoretic ones (including Support Vector Machines and Extreme Learning Machines). Evaluation on numerous problems spanning from small, simple ones from UCI repository to the large (hundreads of thousands of samples) extremely unbalanced (up to 100:1 classes' ratios) datasets shows wide applicability of the EEM in real life problems and that it scales well

Theoretical Interpretations and Applications of Radial Basis Function Networks

Medical applications usually used Radial Basis Function Networks just as Artificial Neural Networks. However, RBFNs are Knowledge-Based Networks that can be interpreted in several way: Artificial Neural Networks, Regularization Networks, Support Vector Machines, Wavelet Networks, Fuzzy Controllers, Kernel Estimators, Instanced-Based Learners. A survey of their interpretations and of their corresponding learning algorithms is provided as well as a brief survey on dynamic learning algorithms. RBFNs' interpretations can suggest applications that are particularly interesting in medical domains