Iterative Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator NADE-k
Tapani Raiko, Yao Li, Kyunghyun Cho, Yoshua Bengio
Code Available — Be the first to reproduce this paper.
ReproduceCode
- github.com/yaoli/nade_knone★ 0
Abstract
Training of the neural autoregressive density estimator (NADE) can be viewed as doing one step of probabilistic inference on missing values in data. We propose a new model that extends this inference scheme to multiple steps, arguing that it is easier to learn to improve a reconstruction in k steps rather than to learn to reconstruct in a single inference step. The proposed model is an unsupervised building block for deep learning that combines the desirable properties of NADE and multi-predictive training: (1) Its test likelihood can be computed analytically, (2) it is easy to generate independent samples from it, and (3) it uses an inference engine that is a superset of variational inference for Boltzmann machines. The proposed NADE-k is competitive with the state-of-the-art in density estimation on the two datasets tested.