Abstract:
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Automatic decision making and pattern recognition under uncertainty are difficult tasks that are ubiquitous in our everyday life. The systems we design, and technology we develop, requires us to coherently represent and work with uncertainty in data. Probabilistic models and probabilistic inference gives us a powerful framework for solving this problem. Using this framework, while enticing, results in difficult-to-compute integrals and probabilities when conditioning on the observed data. This means we have a need for approximate inference, methods that solves the problem approximately using a systematic approach. In this work we develop new methods for efficient approximate inference in probabilistic models. There are generally two approaches to approximate inference, variational methods and Monte Carlo methods. In Monte Carlo methods we use a large number of random samples to approximate the integral of interest. With variational methods, on the other hand, we turn the integration problem into that of an optimization problem. We develop algorithms of both types and bridge the gap between them.
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