TR-A-0094 :1990.11.21

Bunpei IRIE and Mitsuo KAWATO

Extraction of the Nonlinear Global Coordinate System of a Manifold by a Five Layered Hour-Glass Network

Abstract:One of the advantages of the Multi Layered Perceptron (MLP), combined with Back Propagation (BP) algorithm, is its capability of learning from examples. On the other hand, Memory Based Reasoning (MBR) is also known by its learnability from examples, in which method the system memorizes the entire set of the examples of known input-output correspondence and interpolates them in order to calculate outputs for unknown inputs. Naturally, there arises a question whether MLP is a mere variety of MBR where example data are compressed to some extent. In this paper, we will show that MLP has an additional property, i.e. the capability of acquiring internal representation from examples. To show this, a five layered perceptron is made to learn the identity mapping from the input layer to the output layer. Input vectors are distributed on a manifold whose dimension is identical to the number of units in the compressed representation of the third layer. In this configuration, we show that the network succeeds in acquiring the global nonlinear coordinate system which is evidently most suitable for the distribution of the example data. The way to make use of the result for some applications is also discussed.