English

Unsupervised Feature Learning through Divergent Discriminative Feature Accumulation

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2014-06-11 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Unlike unsupervised approaches such as autoencoders that learn to reconstruct their inputs, this paper introduces an alternative approach to unsupervised feature learning called divergent discriminative feature accumulation (DDFA) that instead continually accumulates features that make novel discriminations among the training set. Thus DDFA features are inherently discriminative from the start even though they are trained without knowledge of the ultimate classification problem. Interestingly, DDFA also continues to add new features indefinitely (so it does not depend on a hidden layer size), is not based on minimizing error, and is inherently divergent instead of convergent, thereby providing a unique direction of research for unsupervised feature learning. In this paper the quality of its learned features is demonstrated on the MNIST dataset, where its performance confirms that indeed DDFA is a viable technique for learning useful features.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.1833,
  title  = {Unsupervised Feature Learning through Divergent Discriminative Feature Accumulation},
  author = {Paul A. Szerlip and Gregory Morse and Justin K. Pugh and Kenneth O. Stanley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.1833},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

Corrected citation formatting

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:33:00.722Z