What Autoencoder Meaning, Applications & Example
An unsupervised neural network that learns efficient data encodings.
What is an Autoencoder?
An Autoencoder is a type of neural network used for unsupervised learning , primarily to compress data by encoding it into a lower-dimensional representation and then reconstructing it back to its original form. Autoencoders are commonly used for tasks like data denoising and dimensionality reduction .
Types of Autoencoders
- Sparse Autoencoder: Encourages sparsity in the encoded representation, useful for feature extraction.
- Denoising Autoencoder: Trained to remove noise from data by reconstructing a clean version from noisy input.
- Variational Autoencoder (VAE) : Generates new data samples by learning a probabilistic distribution of the input data.
Applications of Autoencoders
- Image Denoising: Removes noise from images, improving clarity and quality.
- Anomaly Detection : Detects unusual patterns in data by comparing reconstruction error.
- Data Compression: Reduces data dimensions while preserving important features, useful for efficient storage and processing.
Example of an Autoencoder
An example of an Autoencoder is a Denoising Autoencoder, which is trained to reconstruct clean images from noisy ones, often used in image preprocessing tasks.