Minkowski-r Back-Propagation: Learning in Connectionist Models with Non-Euclidian Error Signals

It can be shown that neural-like networks containing a single hidden layer of nonlinear activation units can learn to do a piece-wise linear partitioning of a feature space [2]. One result of such a partitioning is a complex gradient surface on which decisions about new input stimuli will be made. The generalization, categorization and clustering propenies of the network are therefore detennined by this mapping of input stimuli to this gradient swface in the output space. This gradient swface is a function of the conditional probability distributions of the output vectors given the input feature vectors as well as a function of the error relating the teacher signal and output.