October 21, 2020
Work in progress

# How the network is trained

## The entropy framework

Since the network contains a lot of cycles, the usual backpropagation algorithm won't work very well for this type of network. Also relying on handcrafted labels that are applied to the output of the network is very error-prone and it creates a large distance between our training signal and the weights that we would like to adjust. Hence we would like to train our pattern more locally without the reliance on an external signal source. This is where the Shannon entropy framework comes in quite handy. If we consider the example of a word pattern again, we can measure the amount information for each letter, that is the number of bits required to represent this letter in a message, by calculating the Shannon entropy. We can then look at the word pattern neuron as a way of compressing the information given by the individual letter neurons. This compression can be formalized using the mutual information which can then be used to derive an objective function for our training algorithm. The resulting derivative function exhibits a very interesting and unexpected behavior with regard to when the synapse weights and neuron bias values are increased or decreased. Before we go on lets first have a look at the formula for calculating the entropy: $$H(X) = -\sum_{i=1}^n {\mathrm{P}(x_i) \log \mathrm{P}(x_i)}$$ This formula is actually comprised of two parts, the Shannon information or information content or surprisal part: $$I(x) = -\log_b{\left(P\right)}$$ and the calculation of the expected value of the surprisal: $$\operatorname{E}[X] =\sum_{i=1}^n x_i\,p_i$$ The Shannon information can be interpreted as quantifying the level of "surprise" of a particular outcome. So events with a very high probability have a low surprisal value and events with a low probability have high one.

Now that we have an understanding of the basics of Shannon entropy we can go on and see what the information gain is and how it is calculated. The information gain quantifies the "amount of information" obtained about one random variable through observing another random variable. In our example, the observed random variable would be that of the letter and the other one that of the word. The formula for the information gain looks as follows: $$I(X;Y) = \sum_{y \in \mathcal Y} \sum_{x \in \mathcal X} { p_{(X,Y)}(x, y) \log{ \left(\frac{p_{(X,Y)}(x, y)}{p_X(x)\,p_Y(y)} \right) }}$$ To get a better understanding of this formula we can take a closer look at the components its comprised of. It actually uses the concept of the Kullback-Leibler divergence to calculate the divergence between the joint distribution of $$X$$ and $$Y$$ and the product of the marginals. $$D_\text{KL}(P \parallel Q) = \sum_{x\in\mathcal{X}} P(x) \log\left(\frac{P(x)}{Q(x)}\right)$$ In other words, we are using the KL divergence to compare the joint distribution of $$X$$ and $$Y$$ to the special case where these occur independent of each other.
Before going forward we would like to introduce a slightly different notion of the information gain: $$I(X;Y) = \sum_{y \in \mathcal Y} \sum_{x \in \mathcal X} { p_{(X,Y)}(x, y) \left( \log{p_{(X,Y)}(x, y)} - \log{p_X(x)} - \log{p_Y(y)} \right) }$$ As you can see, at the core of this formula are now the surprisal values of different probability distributions. The outer part is actually just the calculation of the expected value of the inner part. We will come back to that later on.

## Counting Frequencies

Since the calculation of the entropy relies on probability distributions, we need to figure how we can determine these. This part may sound easier than it actually is, since there are some pitfalls to consider. A simple way to estimate the probability for a neuron would look like this: $$P(neuron) = \frac{\text{number of fired activations}}{\text{size of the sample space}}$$ Counting the number of fired activations for a neuron is easy but how do we determine the sample space and is the sample space equal for all the neurons? The answer to that question is no. The size of the sample space depends on the space that the activations cover in the input data set. For example an activation representing a single letter requires less space than an activation representing a whole word. In the case of a neuron representing a single letter we could determine the size of the sample space $$N$$ by summing up the number of characters of all the training documents. For neurons whose activations cover a larger space within the document we need to divide the the total number of characters by the average covered area of this neurons activations. $$N_{chars} = \text{number of characters over all training examples}$$ $$c = \text{average space covered by activations of a neuron}$$ $$N = N_{chars} \cdot c$$

## The Beta-Distribution

Another problem with estimating the probability distributions is that we might not have enough training instances for for a reliable statistic after inducing a new neuron or a new synapse. Yet we still want to be able adjust the weights of this neuron. Hence we need a conservative estimate of what we already know for certain about the distribution. Considering that the surprisal ($$-log(p)$$) only gets large when the probability gets close to zero, we can use the cumulative beta-distribution to determine what the maximum probability is that can be explained by the observed frequencies. Lets consider an example where ein frequency $$f$$ is 10 and our sample space $$N$$ is 100. Then we need to choose the parameters $$\alpha$$ and $$\beta$$ in the following manner. $$\alpha = f + 1$$ $$\beta = (N - f) + 1$$ The probability density function $$f(x;\alpha,\beta)$$ of the beta-distribution then looks as follows:

Here we can see how likely each probability estimate is given our measured frequency. In order to choose a reliable estimated probability we need to look at the cumulative distribution function:

If we invert this function and select a threshold, say 5%, than we can estimate an upper bound for our true probability. In other words we are now 95% certain that the true probability distribution underlying the measurement is lower than our estimate. Consequently, we are now able to compute a lower bound value for the surprisal value.

## The optimization problem

Since we would like to optimize the compression rate within the network, we need to find a way to adjust the synapse weights and the neuron biases such that the network requires less information to encode the message of the input data. To do so we will need an objective function that we can convert to its first derivative. Now we are able to use the gradient decent method adjust our synapse weights and bias values. To see how the objective function could look like, we need to take a closer look at a neuron and its input synapses. Let us consider the synapses as information consumers and the neuron itself as an information producer. The synapses or information consumers can now be modeled using the information gain and the neuron can be modeled using the entropy. $$G = H(y) - \sum \limits _{i} I(y, x_i)$$

## Concept Drift

Another problem is that of concept drift. Since we are using the distribution to adjust the synapse weights this will lead to changes in the activation patterns and therefore to changes in the distributions again.