Brain-like approaches to unsupervised learning of hidden representations - a comparative study 
Authors: Naresh Balaji, Anders Lansner, Pawel Herman
Keywords: neural networks, bio-inspired, brain-like, unsupervised learning, structural plasticity
Abstract: Unsupervised learning of hidden representations has been one of the most vibrant research directions in machine learning in recent years. In this work we study the brain-like Bayesian Confidence Propagating Neural Network (BCPNN) model, recently extended to extract sparse distributed high-dimensional representations. The saliency and separability of the hidden representations when trained on MNIST dataset is studied using an external linear classifier and compared with other unsupervised learning methods that include restricted Boltzmann machines and autoencoders.