Discovering and characterizing Hidden Variables
Soumi Ray, Tim Oates · 2010
Theoretical entities are aspects of the world that cannot be sensed directly but that nevertheless are causally relevant.Scientifc inquiry has uncovered many such entities, such as black holes and dark matter.We claim that theoretical entities are important for the development of concepts within the lifetime of an individual, and present a novel neural network architecture that solves three problems related to theoretical entities: (1) discovering that they exist, (2) determining their number, and (3) computing their values.Experiments show the utility of the proposed approach using a discrete time dynamical system in which some of the state variables are hidden, and sensor data obtained from the camera of a mobile robot in which the sizes and locations of ob jects in the visual eld are observed but their sizes and locations (distances) in the three-dimensional world are not.