Hyperplane Neural Codes and the Polar Complex

Abstract

Hyperplane codes are a class of convex codes that arise as the output of a one layer feed-forward neural network. Here we establish several natural properties of stable hyperplane codes in terms of the {\it polar complex} of the code, a simplicial complex associated to any combinatorial code. We prove that the polar complex of a stable hyperplane code is shellable and show that most currently known properties of the hyperplane codes follow from the shellability of the appropriate polar complex.