Rik,

Well this particular email thread was about helping Jim with his current
experiment, which dealt with memorizing the training set (no
generalization). In that context, I believe all my comments were accurate.

However, I agree with you that a real notion of capacity has to go well
beyond that.  We have to consider generalization to novel inputs,
 appropriate similarity metrics, and how well the system might perform in a
real world scenario.  Beyond the SP, we also have to incorporate the
(considerable) impact of sequence learning, pooling, and hierarchy.

--Subutai


On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 4:48 AM, Rik <[email protected]> wrote:

>    Sorry what value can be 1 billion? You keep bringing up that number.
>> No spatial pooler of any sane dimensions has a capacity of 1 billion. Not
>> for any reasonable definition of "capacity".
>>
>
>  In this case we are just trying to discriminate between a fixed set of
> patterns. By "discriminate" we mean the SDR output should be unique with
> respect to the other patterns by at least one winning column.  Since there
> are 1024 columns, of which 64 are on at a time, the total number of
> patterns that can be discriminated is 1024 choose 64 > 10^102. In reality
> it will be less than that, but if two inputs differ by more than a few
> bits, we will have at least one column that is different. As such, there is
> quite a bit of room here.
>
> The SP output can possibly produce 1 billion+ different patterns but that
> is what I would consider its "resolution", not its "capacity" or "accuracy"
> which is what we're after in this thread and what is the desirable property
> that one seeks to evaluate and optimize. A completely unlearned SP will
> also produce 1 billion+ different output patterns so that can't possibly be
> an interesting property.
>
> A real-world analogy: The local jeweler weighs precious metals with scales
> boasting a resolution of .01g but in the interest of getting a fair deal on
> my silver I'd rather know their accuracy. Scales with a resolution of .01g
> can still be off by 5g and usually will be so straight off the assembly
> line so they have to be calibrated, a primitive material world version of
> "learning".
>
> Or your digital SLR camera + computer monitor boast a 24bit color depth
> allowing for 4 million+ colors but that's saying nothing about how
> faithfully they reproduce the exact shade of red of a flower that you
> photographed and there's a calibration/"learning" process too that involves
> photographing known colors off a pantone sheet.
>
> A good definition of SP capacity or accuracy would IMHO involve a
> correlation between inputs and ouputs, along the lines of how well clusters
> in the input vector space correlate to clusters in the output vector space.
> Just thinking out loud here.
>
> -- Rik
>
>
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