Overview and Examples

The latest release of Netlab includes the following algorithms:

• PCA
• Mixtures of probabilistic PCA
• Gaussian mixture model with EM training algorithm
• Linear and logistic regression with IRLS training algorithm
• Multi-layer perceptron with linear, logistic and softmax outputs and appropriate error functions
• Radial basis function (RBF) networks with both Gaussian and non-local basis functions
• Optimisers, including quasi-Newton methods, conjugate gradients and scaled conjugate gradients
• Multi-layer perceptron with Gaussian mixture outputs (mixture density networks)
• Gaussian prior distributions over parameters for the MLP, RBF and GLM including multiple hyper-parameters
• Laplace approximation framework for Bayesian inference (evidence procedure)
• Automatic Relevance Determination for input selection
• Markov chain Monte-Carlo including simple Metropolis and hybrid Monte-Carlo
• K-nearest neighbour classifier
• K-means clustering
• Generative Topographic Map
• Neuroscale topographic projection
• Gaussian Processes
• Hinton diagrams for network weights
• Self-organising map

Backwards compatibility

• Certain networks (of MLP and MDN types) trained under earlier versions of the toolkit will not work with the new functions. This is due to a change of name of one field in the new data structure. It can be corrected by running the Netlab function convertoldnet after the network has been loaded in Matlab. This function works correctly with all networks, both version 3.2 and earlier.
• The K-nearest-neighbour implementation now involves a data structure (to store the training data) so has separate creation and running functions knn and knnfwd respectively. See demknn for an example of how these should be used.

Documentation is provided in two forms: brief information is provided via the Matlab help system, while a full on-line reference manual is supplied in HTML, which can be read with any suitable browser (such as Netscape®). Netlab is provided with demonstration programs and data sets to illustrate its use on a variety of problems.

Netlab is implemented as a set of functions written in the Matlab language and requires the Matlab environment to run. Matlab is an extendible technical computing environment offering powerful numeric computation and visualisation tools. Netlab uses only core Matlab functions, so is not dependent on any of the optional toolboxes.

Examples