OBJECTIVE FUNCTION FORMULATION OF THE BCM THEORY OF VISUAL CORTICAL PLASTICITY - STATISTICAL CONNECTIONS, STABILITY CONDITIONS

In this paper, we present an objective function formulation of the Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) theory of visual cortical plasticity that permits us to demonstrate the connection between the unsupervised BCM learning procedure and various statistical methods, in particular, that of Projection Pursuit. This formulation provides a general method for stability analysis of the fixed points of theory and enables us to analyze the behavior and the evolution of the network under various visual rearing conditions. It also allows comparison with many existing unsupervised methods. This model has been shown successful in various applications such as phoneme and 3D object recognition. We thus have the striking and possibly highly significant result that a biological neuron is performing a sophisticated statistical procedure.