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Natural gradient works efficiently in learning


Author(s) : Shun-ichi Amari, 
Publisher : N/A
Publication Date : 1998
ISSN : N/A
Abstract : When a parameter space has a certain underlying structure, the ordinary gradient of a function does not represent its steepest direction but the natural gradient does. Information geometry is used for calculating the natural gradients in the parameter space of perceptrons, the space of matrices (for blind source separation) and the space of linear dynamical systems (for blind source deconvolution). The dynamical behavior of natural gradient on-line learning is analyzed and is proved to be Fisher efficient, implying that it has asymptotically the same performance as the optimal batch estimation of parameters. This suggests that the plateau phenomenon which appears in the backpropagation learning algorithm of multilayer perceptrons might disappear or might be not so serious when the natural gradient is used. An adaptive method of updating the learning rate is proposed and analyzed.,