Learning the values of the hyperparameters of a dynamic Boltzmann machine

The dynamic Boltzmann machine (DyBM) has recently been proposed as a model of an artificial recurrent neural network that can be trained via spike-timing-dependent plasticity, a learning rule that has been postulated and experimentally confirmed for biological neural networks. More specifically, the parameters such as weights and biases of a DyBM can be optimized via this learning “rule” in a way that the likelihood of given time-series data is maximized (i.e., the time-series data are most likely to be generated according to the probability distributions defined by the DyBM with the optimized parameters). However, a DyBM has hyperparameters that need to be tuned by other means. These hyperparameters include the decay rates of eligibility traces and the lengths of first-in-first-out queues. Here, we propose ways to learn the values of the hyperparameters of a DyBM. In particular, we tune the value of the decay rate via a stochastic gradient method with an approximation, to keep the learning time in each step independent of the length of the time-series used for learning. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in the settings of predicting sequential patterns, including music.