Whence Sparseness?

Abstract

It has been shown that the receptive fields of simple cells in VI can be ex(cid:173) plained by assuming optimal encoding, provided that an extra constraint of sparseness is added. This finding suggests that there is a reason, in(cid:173) dependent of optimal representation, for sparseness. However this work used an ad hoc model for the noise. Here I show that, if a biologically more plausible noise model, describing neurons as Poisson processes, is used sparseness does not have to be added as a constraint. Thus I con(cid:173) clude that sparseness is not a feature that evolution has striven for, but is simply the result of the evolutionary pressure towards an optimal repre(cid:173) sentation.

Cite

Text

van Vreeswijk. "Whence Sparseness?." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2000.

Markdown

[van Vreeswijk. "Whence Sparseness?." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2000.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2000/vanvreeswijk2000neurips-whence/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{vanvreeswijk2000neurips-whence,
  title     = {{Whence Sparseness?}},
  author    = {van Vreeswijk, Carl},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2000},
  pages     = {180-186},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2000/vanvreeswijk2000neurips-whence/}
}