Annealing and the Rate Distortion Problem

Albert E. Parker, Tomá\v S. Gedeon, Alexander G. Dimitrov

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)

In this paper we introduce methodology to determine the bifurcation structure of optima for a class of similar cost functions from Rate Distortion Theory, Determin- istic Annealing, Information Distortion and the Information Bottleneck Method. We also introduce a numerical algorithm which uses the explicit form of the bifur- cating branches to find optima at a bifurcation point.