Rapid Feature Learning with Stacked Linear Denoisers

We investigate unsupervised pre-training of deep architectures as feature generators for “shallow” classifiers. Stacked Denoising Autoencoders (SdA) [23], when used as feature pre-processing tools for SVM classification, can lead to significant improvements in accuracy – however, at the price of a substantial increase in computational cost. In this paper we create a simple algorithm which mimics the layer by layer training of SdAs. However, in contrast to SdAs, our algorithm requires no training through gradient descent as the parameters can be computed in closed-form. It can be implemented in less than 20 lines of MATLABand reduces the computation time from several hours to mere seconds. We show that our feature transformation reliably improves the results of SVM classification significantly on all our data sets – often outperforming SdAs and even deep neural networks in three out of four deep learning benchmarks.