Linear-Time Sequence Classification using Restricted Boltzmann Machines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, efficient sequence classification model using rolling Restricted Boltzmann Machines that outperforms some state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, intractability-optimized RBM-based model for sequence classification that combines representation learning and temporal inference.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in melody modeling and OCR

Comparable to complex RNNs with fewer parameters

Demonstrates effectiveness on POS tagging and text chunking

Abstract

Classification of sequence data is the topic of interest for dynamic Bayesian models and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). While the former can explicitly model the temporal dependencies between class variables, the latter have a capability of learning representations. Several attempts have been made to improve performance by combining these two approaches or increasing the processing capability of the hidden units in RNNs. This often results in complex models with a large number of learning parameters. In this paper, a compact model is proposed which offers both representation learning and temporal inference of class variables by rolling Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and class variables over time. We address the key issue of intractability in this variant of RBMs by optimising a conditional distribution, instead of a joint distribution. Experiments reported in the paper on melody modelling and optical character recognition show that the proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art. Also, the experimental results on optical character recognition, part-of-speech tagging and text chunking demonstrate that our model is comparable to recurrent neural networks with complex memory gates while requiring far fewer parameters.