Means, Correlations and Bounds

The partition function for a Boltzmann machine can be bounded from above and below. We can use this to bound the means and the correlations. For networks with small weights, the values of these statistics can be restricted to nontrivial regions (i.e. a subset of [-1, 1]). Experimental results show that reasonable bounding occurs for weight sizes where mean field expansions generally give good results. 1 Introduction Over the last decade, bounding techniques have become a popular tool to deal with graphical models that are too complex for exact computation. A nice property of bounds is that they give at least some information you can rely on.