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Information Theory, Inference, and Learning ... - MAELabs UCSD

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Copyright Cambridge University Press 2003. On-screen viewing permitted. Printing not permitted. http://www.cambridge.org/0521642981<br />

You can buy this book for 30 pounds or $50. See http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/ for links.<br />

Postscript on Supervised Neural<br />

Networks<br />

One of my students, Robert, asked:<br />

Maybe I’m missing something fundamental, but supervised neural<br />

networks seem equivalent to fitting a pre-defined function to some<br />

given data, then extrapolating – what’s the difference?<br />

I agree with Robert. The supervised neural networks we have studied so far<br />

are simply parameterized nonlinear functions which can be fitted to data.<br />

Hopefully you will agree with another comment that Robert made:<br />

Unsupervised networks seem much more interesting than their supervised<br />

counterparts. I’m amazed that it works!<br />

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