Sparse autoencoder¶

It is an example of regularized autoencoder where the hidden code \(h\) is larger than the input \(x\). Normally this would result in an overcomplete autoencoder.

To avoid overfitting we introduce a sparsity penalty \(\Omega(h)\) to the loss function:

\[ L(x,g(f(x))) + \Omega(h) \]
  • \(g\) decoder

  • \(f\) encoder

  • \(h\) hidden state

Sparsity forces learning unique statistical features of the data