Population Coding Can Greatly Improve Performance of Neural Networks: A Comparison

Artificial neural networks oftentimes operate on continuous inputs. While biological neural networks usually represent information through the activity of a population of neurons, the inputs of an artificial neural network are typically provided as a list of scalars. As the information content of each of the input scalars depends heavily on the problem domain, representing them as individual scalar inputs, irrespective of the amount of information they contain, may prove to be suboptimal for the network. We therefore compare and examine four different Population Coding schemes and demonstrate on two toy datasets and one real world benchmark that applying Population Coding to information rich, low dimensional inputs can vastly improve a network’s performance.