Extrapolation of Periodic Functions Using Binary Encoding of Continuous Numerical Values

Brian P. Powell; Jordan A. Caraballo-Vega; Mark L. Carroll; Thomas Maxwell; Andrew Ptak; Greg Olmschenk; Jorge Martinez-Palomera

Paper

Extrapolation of Periodic Functions Using Binary Encoding of Continuous Numerical Values

Abstract

We report the discovery that binary encoding allows neural networks to extrapolate periodic functions beyond their training bounds. We introduce Normalized Base-2 Encoding (NB2E) as a method for encoding continuous numerical values and demonstrate that, using this input encoding, vanilla multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) successfully extrapolate diverse periodic signals without prior knowledge of their functional form. Internal activation analysis reveals that NB2E induces bit-phase representations, enabling MLPs to learn and extrapolate signal structure independently of position.