On the Equivalence of the Weighted Tsetlin Machine and the Perceptron
This work bridges conceptual differences for researchers in interpretable AI, but it is incremental as it builds on existing TM theory without introducing new methods or broad SOTA results.
The paper tackles the theoretical gap between the Tsetlin Machine (TM) and perceptrons by analyzing their operational concepts, showing that TM's weight update is a special case of gradient update, and provides empirical analysis of TM's flexibility and interpretability.
Tsetlin Machine (TM) has been gaining popularity as an inherently interpretable machine leaning method that is able to achieve promising performance with low computational complexity on a variety of applications. The interpretability and the low computational complexity of the TM are inherited from the Boolean expressions for representing various sub-patterns. Although possessing favorable properties, TM has not been the go-to method for AI applications, mainly due to its conceptual and theoretical differences compared with perceptrons and neural networks, which are more widely known and well understood. In this paper, we provide detailed insights for the operational concept of the TM, and try to bridge the gap in the theoretical understanding between the perceptron and the TM. More specifically, we study the operational concept of the TM following the analytical structure of perceptrons, showing the resemblance between the perceptrons and the TM. Through the analysis, we indicated that the TM's weight update can be considered as a special case of the gradient weight update. We also perform an empirical analysis of TM by showing the flexibility in determining the clause length, visualization of decision boundaries and obtaining interpretable boolean expressions from TM. In addition, we also discuss the advantages of TM in terms of its structure and its ability to solve more complex problems.