An analysis of single-layer networks in unsupervised feature learning

A great deal of research has focused on algorithms for learning features from unlabeled data. Indeed, much progress has been made on benchmark datasets like NORB and CIFAR by employing increasingly complex unsupervised learning algorithms and deep models. In this paper, however, we show that several simple factors, such as the number of hidden nodes in the model, may be more important to achieving high performance than the learning algorithm or the depth of the model. Specifically, we will apply several offthe-shelf feature learning algorithms (sparse auto-encoders, sparse RBMs, K-means clustering, and Gaussian mixtures) to CIFAR, NORB, and STL datasets using only singlelayer networks. We then present a…