Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 12 (NIPS 1999)
Hava Siegelmann, Alexander Roitershtein, Asa Ben-Hur
In this paper we define a probabilistic computational model which generalizes many noisy neural network models, including the recent work of Maass and Sontag [5]. We identify weak ergodicjty as the mechanism responsible for restriction of the computational power of probabilistic models to definite languages, independent of the characteristics of the noise: whether it is discrete or analog, or if it depends on the input or not, and independent of whether the variables are discrete or continuous. We give examples of weakly ergodic models including noisy computational systems with noise depending on the current state and inputs, aggregate models, and computational systems which update in continuous time.