About: Nowadays this is very popular to use the deep architectures in machine learning. Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) are deep architectures that use a stack of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) to create a powerful generative model using training data. DBNs have many abilities such as feature extraction and classification that are used in many applications including image processing, speech processing, text categorization, etc. This paper introduces a new object oriented toolbox with the most important abilities needed for the implementation of DBNs. According to the results of the experiments conducted on the MNIST (image), ISOLET (speech), and the 20 Newsgroups (text) datasets, it was shown that the toolbox can learn automatically a good representation of the input from unlabeled data with better discrimination between different classes. Also on all the aforementioned datasets, the obtained classification errors are comparable to those of the state of the art classifiers. In addition, the toolbox supports different sampling methods (e.g. Gibbs, CD, PCD and our new FEPCD method), different sparsity methods (quadratic, rate distortion and our new normal method), different RBM types (generative and discriminative), GPU based, etc. The toolbox is a user-friendly open source software in MATLAB and Octave and is freely available on the website.

New in toolbox

• Using GPU in Backpropagation
• Revision of some demo scripts
• Function approximation with multiple outputs
• Feature extraction with GRBM in first layer

About: PLearn is a large C++ machine-learning library with a set of Python tools and Python bindings. It is mostly a research platform for developing novel algorithms, and is being used extensively at [...]

Initial Announcement on mloss.org.