Reconstructing the Hopfield network as an inverse Ising problem

We test four fast mean-field-type algorithms on Hopfield networks as an inverse Ising problem. The equilibrium behavior of Hopfield networks is simulated through Glauber dynamics. In the low-temperature regime, the simulated annealing technique is adopted. Although performances of these network reconstruction algorithms on the simulated network of spiking neurons are extensively studied recently, the analysis of Hopfield networks is lacking so far. For the Hopfield network, we found that, in the retrieval phase favored when the network wants to memory one of stored patterns, all the reconstruction algorithms fail to extract interactions within a desired accuracy, and the same failure occurs in the spin-glass phase where spurious minima show up, while in the paramagnetic phase, albeit unfavored during the retrieval dynamics, the algorithms work well to reconstruct the network itself. This implies that, as an inverse problem, the paramagnetic phase is conversely useful for reconstructing the network while the retrieval phase loses all the information about interactions in the network except for the case where only one pattern is stored. The performances of algorithms are studied with respect to the system size, memory load, and temperature; sample-to-sample fluctuations are also considered.