Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13 (NIPS 2000)
Sepp Hochreiter, Michael C. Mozer
The goal of many unsupervised learning procedures is to bring two probability distributions into alignment. Generative models such as Gaussian mixtures and Boltzmann machines can be cast in this light, as can recoding models such as ICA and projection pursuit. We propose a novel sample-based error measure for these classes of models, which applies even in situations where maximum likelihood (ML) and probability density estimation-based formulations can(cid:173) not be applied, e.g., models that are nonlinear or have intractable posteriors. Furthermore, our sample-based error measure avoids the difficulties of approximating a density function. We prove that with an unconstrained model, (1) our approach converges on the correct solution as the number of samples goes to infinity, and (2) the expected solution of our approach in the generative framework is the ML solution. Finally, we evaluate our approach via simula(cid:173) tions of linear and nonlinear models on mixture of Gaussians and ICA problems. The experiments show the broad applicability and generality of our approach.