The Helmholtz machine is a name used by Geoff Hinton to describe a class of neural networks which learn the hidden structure of a set of data by being trained to create a generative model which can produce the original set of data. The hope is that by learning economical representations of the data, the underlying structure of the generative model should reasonably approximate the hidden structure of the data set. This is an unsupervised learning algorithm.
The networks are characterized by bottom-up and top-down (reentrant) connections between layers of stochastic elements. The wake-sleep algorithm is an unsupervised learning rule which has been suggested as a means to train the Helmholtz machine.
Helmholtz machines may also be used in applications requiring a supervised learning algorithm (e.g. character recognition, or position-invariant recognition of an object within a field).
Famous quotes containing the word machine:
“The American people is out to get the kaiser. We are bending every nerve and every energy towards that end; anybody who gets in the way of the great machine the energy and devotion of a hundred million patriots is building towards the stainless purpose of saving civilization from the Huns will be mashed like a fly. I’m surprised that a collegebred man like you hasn’t more sense. Don’t monkey with the buzzsaw.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)