robust statistics

[Terry Sejnowski]

One man's outlier is another man's data point.  Another
way to handle outliers is not to remove them but to model them
explicitly.  Geoff Hinton has pointed out that character
recognition can be made more robust by including models
for background noise such as postmarks.

Steve Nowlan and I recently used mixtures of expert networks
to separate multiple interpenetrating flow fields -- the
transparency problem for visual motion.  The gating network
was used to select regions of the visual field that 
contained reliable estimates of local velocity for 
which there was coherent global support.  There is
evidence for such selection neurons in area MT of primate
visual cortex, a region of cortex that specializes in
the detection of coherent motion.

Terry

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