Title
Soft-Constrained Neural Networks for Nonparametric Density Estimation.
Abstract
The paper introduces a robust connectionist technique for the empirical nonparametric estimation of multivariate probability density functions (pdf) from unlabeled data samples (still an open issue in pattern recognition and machine learning). To this end, a soft-constrained unsupervised algorithm for training a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is proposed. A variant of the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm (exploiting the very probabilistic nature of the present MLP) is used to guarantee a model that satisfies numerically Kolmogorov’s second axiom of probability. The approach overcomes the major limitations of the established statistical and connectionist pdf estimators. Graphical and quantitative experimental results show that the proposed technique can offer estimates that improve significantly over parametric and nonparametric approaches, regardless of (1) the complexity of the underlying pdf, (2) the dimensionality of the feature space, and (3) the amount of data available for training.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s11063-017-9740-1
Neural Processing Letters
Keywords
Field
DocType
Density estimation,Nonparametric estimation,Unsupervised learning,Constrained learning,Multilayer perceptron
Density estimation,Pattern recognition,Nonparametric regression,Nonparametric statistics,Parametric statistics,Multilayer perceptron,Unsupervised learning,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Mathematics,Estimator
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
48
2
1370-4621
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
11
Authors
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Edmondo Trentin128629.25