Hi all,

Thanks for the help. But I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by
topology. As far as I understand, the spatial pooler has 2 functions :
Return a set of columns that are 1)sparse and 2)distributed.

Sparsity can be maintained by making sure that the pooler returns only n%
of columns and this criterion can be made into a test. And distribution can
be tested by computing the average distance between winning columns. What
is topology? Is it another way of referring to a distributed set of
columns? I might need some help with local learning too. I'm afraid I have
never heard the term before (its in the white paper? A quick search on the
pdf did not see any hits for "local learning")

Thanks,

Kevin Martin


On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Scott Purdy <[email protected]> wrote:

> I would go over the properties of the SP and create tests accordingly. The
> output, for instance, should be tolerant to spatial noise. So show an
> instance a set of very different spatial patterns over and over a number of
> times. Then show one of the patterns with a single bit flipped and make
> sure the output is very close (possibly identical if columns are saturated)
> to the same.
>
> There are a bunch of similar things you could check.
>
> Ian had a hackathon demo showing the connected bits for each column. He
> was able to validate different aspects of the SP visually by using
> different numbers of columns and % overlap.
>
> You could do something similar to make sure you see the right behavior but
> I don't know if you could make an automated test out of it.
>
>
> http://numenta.org/blog/2013/11/06/2013-fall-hackathon-outcome.html#sp_viewer
> On Feb 4, 2014 11:23 AM, "Jeff Hawkins" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Kevin,
>>
>> Adding on to what Fergal said....
>>
>>
>>
>> Here is what we did.  We started with a fixed number of columns and no
>> topology.  In this situation we picked the n% most innervated columns as
>> the output of the SP.  Thus we were *guaranteed* to get the correct
>> sparsity of active columns.  With this setup we did a lot of other tests to
>> verify that the SP was forming good representations.
>>
>>
>>
>> The tricky part is if you want to do this with topology and local
>> learning rules.   Is that your concern?
>>
>>
>>
>> With topology we didn't try to guarantee the entire layer of cells will
>> have exactly n% active columns.  Exact numbers are not essential.  We tried
>> several different local learning rules, all of them produced about the
>> right level of sparsity.  We than ran the other tests to make sure that
>> local learning rules didn't cause the SP to form poor representations.  You
>> won't get exactly the same results with topology and without topology but
>> my recollection was we were able to come up with a set of local inhibition
>> rules that produced good results.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* nupic [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Fergal
>> Byrne
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 04, 2014 10:43 AM
>> *To:* NuPIC general mailing list.
>> *Subject:* Re: [nupic-discuss] Tests for spatial pooling
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi Kevin,
>>
>>
>>
>> If you're using no topology (and no local inhibition) then the fraction
>> of active columns (2% in NuPIC) is the only important factor. With
>> topology, you should choose winners relative to their neighbours. In either
>> case, the first test is to count the fraction of active columns. In the
>> second case, measure the average distance between active columns.
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>
>>
>> Fergal Byrne
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 6:05 PM, Kevin Martin <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm writing my own version of the CLA. I have not reached anywhere
>> significant and I have been playing with a very small number of columns
>> until now. I am starting by implementing a spatial pooler and spatial
>> pooling requires a large number of columns. So far it has been easy to
>> manually check if the synapses are distributed throughout the input, if the
>> winning columns are really sparse etc. But it is going to be impossible
>> when, say,I use 1000 columns. Have somebody used a test to check if the
>> spatial pooler outputs a sparse distribution? Any suggestions on how to
>> write a test?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Kevin Martin Jose
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT
>>
>>
>>
>> http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology
>>
>>
>>
>> e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179
>>
>> Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie
>>
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>>
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