BOOK AND SOFTWARE ANNOUNCEMENT A new release (3.2) of the Netlab toolbox is now available from http://www.ncrg.aston.ac.uk/netlab Written in Matlab, this freely available software includes implementations of a wide range of data analysis techniques, many of which are not available in other neural network simulation packages. An accompanying text book, titled "Netlab: Algorithms for Pattern Recognition" written by Ian Nabney is published by Springer (ISBN: 1-85233-440-1). This book has the following features: 1. Supplies both algorithm knowledge and practical tools for a principled approach to application development. 2. Brings together relevant theory with details of how to implement models efficiently and flexibly. 3. Makes some of the leading edge research in this area accessible in a highly usable form. 4. Provides researchers with a tool kit as a basis for developing new ideas. 5. Worked examples and demonstration programs illustrate the theory and help the reader understand the algorithms and how to use them. The software includes the following algorithms: PCA Mixtures of probabilistic PCA Gaussian mixture model with EM training algorithm Linear and logistic regression with IRLS training algorithm Multi-layer perceptron with linear, logistic and softmax outputs and appropriate error functions Radial basis function (RBF) networks with both Gaussian and non-local basis functions Optimisers, including quasi-Newton methods, conjugate gradients and scaled conjugate gradients Multi-layer perceptron with Gaussian mixture outputs (mixture density networks) Gaussian prior distributions over parameters for the MLP, RBF and GLM including multiple hyper-parameters Laplace approximation framework for Bayesian inference (evidence procedure) Automatic Relevance Determination for input selection Markov chain Monte-Carlo including simple Metropolis and hybrid Monte-Carlo K-nearest neighbour classifier K-means clustering Generative Topographic Map Neuroscale topographic projection Gaussian Processes Hinton diagrams for network weights Self-organising map -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Ian Nabney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cardionetics Institute of Bioinformatics tel: +44 (0)121 333 4631 Aston University fax: +44 (0)121 333 4586 Aston Triangle Birmingham B4 7ET http://www.ncrg.aston.ac.uk/
