An Overview of Restricted Boltzmann Machines

The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layered network of stochastic units with undirected connections between pairs of units in the two layers. The two layers of nodes are called visible and hidden nodes. In an RBM, there are no connections from visible to visible or hidden to hidden nodes. RBMs are used mainly as a generative model. They can be suitably modified to perform classification tasks also. They are among the basic building blocks of other deep learning models such as deep Boltzmann machine and deep belief networks. The aim of this article is to give a tutorial introduction to the restricted Boltzmann machines and to review the evolution of this model.