Autoencoders

Autoencoders are symmetric networks used for unsupervised learning, where output units are connected back to input units:

Autoencoder simple representation from H2O training book (https://github.com/h2oai/h2o-training-book/blob/master/hands-on_training/images/autoencoder.png)

The output layer has the same size of the input layer because its purpose is to reconstruct its own inputs rather than predicting a dependent target value.

The goal of those networks is to act as a compression filter via an encoding layer, Φ that fits the input vector X into a smaller latent representation (the code) c, and then a decoding layer, Φ tries to reconstruct it back to X':

The loss function is the reconstruction error, which will force the network to find the most efficient compact representation of the training data with minimum information loss. For numerical input, the loss function can be the mean squared error:

If the input data is not numerical but is represented as a vector...