Are unsupervised neural networks ignorant? Sizing the effect of environmental distributions on unsupervised learning

  • Authors:
  • Sébastien Hélie;Sylvain Chartier;Robert Proulx

  • Affiliations:
  • Département de Psychologie, Laboratoire d'ítude en Intelligences Naturelle et Artificielle, Université du Québec Á Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-ville, Montré ...;Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada and Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Philippe Pinel de Montréal, Canada;Département de Psychologie, Laboratoire d'ítude en Intelligences Naturelle et Artificielle, Université du Québec Á Montréal, C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-ville, Montré ...

  • Venue:
  • Cognitive Systems Research
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Learning environmental biases is a rational behavior: by using prior odds, Bayesian networks rapidly became a benchmark in machine learning. Moreover, a growing body of evidence now suggests that humans are using base rate information. Unsupervised connectionist networks are used in computer science for machine learning and in psychology to model human cognition, but it is unclear whether they are sensitive to prior odds. In this paper, we show that hard competitive learners are unable to use environmental biases while recurrent associative memories use frequency of exemplars and categories independently. Hence, it is concluded that recurrent associative memories are more useful than hard competitive networks to model human cognition and have a higher potential in machine learning.