Redundancy reduction revisited
Redundancy reduction revisited
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DOI：
10.1088/0954-898x/12/3/301
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发表时间：
2001-08-01
影响因子：
7.8
通讯作者：
Barlow, H
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Barlow, H
香农定义冗余概念后不久，有人提出它可以洞察感觉处理、感知、智能和推理的机制，我们现在可以判断这个想法是否有什么意义，我们是否可以看到它应该将我们的思维引导到哪里？本文认为，最初的假设过分强调压缩编码和经济性在神经元数量中的作用是错误的，但引起人们对冗余重要性的关注是正确的。此外，它现在指出了一个明确的方向，即概率和统计学在神经科学中的压倒性重要性。大脑必须在竞争激烈、机会驱动的世界中决定行动，为了做好这一点，它必须了解并利用感官信息所发出的物体和事件的非随机概率和相互依赖性。这些与最佳行动方案的贝叶斯计算特别相关。我们不应该将神经表征视为刺激能量的转换，而应该将它们视为对当前环境假设的可能真相的近似估计，因为这些是按照贝叶斯原理工作的概率大脑所需的数量。
Soon after Shannon defined the concept of redundancy it was suggested that it gave insight into mechanisms of sensory processing, perception, intelligence and inference, Can we now judge whether there is anything in this idea, and can we see where it should direct our thinking? This paper argues that the original hypothesis was wrong in over-emphasizing the role of compressive coding and economy in neuron numbers, but right in drawing attention to the importance of redundancy. Furthermore there is a clear direction in which it now points, namely to the overwhelming importance of probabilities and statistics in neuroscience. The brain has to decide upon actions in a competitive, chance-driven world, and to do this well it must know about and exploit the non-random probabilities and interdependences of objects and events signalled by sensory messages. These are particularly relevant for Bayesian calculations of the optimum course of action. Instead of thinking of neural representations as transformations of stimulus energies, we should regard them as approximate estimates of the probable truths of hypotheses about the current environment, for these are the quantities required by a probabilistic brain working on Bayesian principles.