Multi-Valued Autoencoders and Classification of Large-Scale Multi-Class Problem

Two-layered neural networks are well known as autoencoders (AEs) in order to reduce the dimensionality of data. AEs are successfully employed as pre-trained layers of neural networks for classification tasks. Most of the existing studies conceived real-valued AEs in real-valued neural networks. This study investigated complexand quaternion-valued AEs for complexand quaternion-valued neural networks. Inputs, weights, biases, and outputs in complex-valued AE (CAE) are complex variables, whereas those in quaternion-valued AE (QAE) are quaternions. In both methods, a split-type activation function is used in the hidden and output units. To deal with the images using the proposed methods, pairs of pixels are allotted to complex-valued inputs in the CAE and quartets of pixels are allotted to quaternion-valued inputs in the QAE. Proposed autoencoders are tested and performance compared with conventional AE for several tasks which are encoding/decoding, handwritten numeral recognition and large-scale multi-class classification. Proposed CAE and QAE revealed as good recognition methods for the tasks and outperformed conventional AE with significance performance in case of largescale multi-class images recognition. Keywords—Autoencoder; classification; complex-valued autoencoder; quaternion-valued autoencoder; recognition