A higher order Bayesian neural network with spiking units.

We treat a Bayesian confidence propagation neural network, primarily in a classifier context. The one-layer version of the network implements a naive Bayesian classifier, which requires the input attributes to be independent. This limitation is overcome by a higher order network. The higher order Bayesian neural network is evaluated on a real world task of diagnosing a telephone exchange computer. By introducing stochastic spiking units, and soft interval coding, it is also possible to handle uncertain as well as continuous valued inputs.