Comparison of sigmoid belief nets and
Boltzmann machines
SBN’s can use a bigger
learning rate because
they do not have the
negative phase (see
Neal’s paper).
It is much easier to
generate samples from
an SBN so we can see
what model we learned.
It is easier to interpret the
units as hidden causes.
The Gibbs sampling
procedure is much
simpler in BM’s.
Gibbs sampling and
learning only require
communication of binary
states in a BM, so its
easier to fit into a brain.