Basic Spatial Pooler Questions

[rhyolight]

@Hopding

Does the spatial pooler have any role in finding patterns between multiple input fields? For example, if I have field-1 and field-2, and I encode them each into binary vectors, then concatenate these vectors and feed them into a spatial pooler, does it find spatial patterns between them? E.g. does it learn that when field-1’s value spikes, that field-2’s value dips? My current understanding says, yes, it does; but I’m having some difficulty putting into words exactly why that is the case…

One of the NuPIC encoders is called MultiEncoder. I think that is exactly what it does (flattens the multiple fields into one input).

numenta/nupic-legacy/blob/master/src/nupic/encoders/multi.py#L62