Colloquium: "Revisiting latent variable models from a deep learning perspective"

Abstract: Latent variable models are an indispensable and powerful tool for uncovering the hidden structure of observed data for image analysis. The well-known latent variable models in statistics include linear mixed models and Gaussian mixture models. The powerful generative models in machine learning such as GANs and VAEs also belong to latent variable models. Existing methods often suffer from two major challenges in practice: (a) a proper latent variable distribution is difficult to be specified; (b) making an exact likelihood inference is formidable due to the intractable computation. We propose a novel framework for the inference of latent variable models that overcomes these two limitations. This new framework allows for a fully data-driven latent variable distribution via deep neural networks, and the proposed stochastic gradient method, combined with the Langevin algorithm, is efficient and suitable for complex models and big data. We provide theoretical results for the Langevin algorithm and establish the convergence analysis of the optimization method. This framework has demonstrated superior practical performance through simulation studies and a real data analysis.

Host: Jose Figueroa-Lopez