Statistical mechanics of lossy compression using multilayer perceptrons

Statistical mechanics is applied to lossy compression using multilayer perceptrons for unbiased Boolean messages. We utilize a tree-like committee machine (committee tree) and tree-like parity machine (parity tree) whose transfer functions are monotonic. For compression using committee tree, a lower bound of achievable distortion becomes small as the number of hidden units K increases. However, it cannot reach the Shannon bound even where K -> infty. For a compression using a parity tree with K >= 2 hidden units, the rate distortion function, which is known as the theoretical limit for compression, is derived where the code length becomes infinity.