Product of experts (PoE) is a

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

technique. It models a probability distribution by combining the output from several simpler distributions. It was proposed by

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on ar ...

, along with an algorithm for training the parameters of such a system. The core idea is to combine several probability distributions ("experts") by multiplying their density functions—making the PoE classification similar to an "and" operation. This allows each expert to make decisions on the basis of a few dimensions without having to cover the full dimensionality of a problem. This is related to (but quite different from) a

mixture model In statistics, a mixture model is a probabilistic model for representing the presence of subpopulations within an overall population, without requiring that an observed data set should identify the sub-population to which an individual observation ...

, where several probability distributions are combined via an "or" operation, which is a weighted sum of their density functions.

External links

* Machine learning {{Compu-stub