deep belief networks

(50 minutes to learn)

Summary

Deep belief networks (DBNs) are a kind of deep, multilayer graphical model which contains both directed and undirected edges. The bottom layer represents the inputs, and the higher layers are meant to represent increasingly abstract features of the data. DBNs can be trained in a layerwise fashion, and are often used to initialize deep discriminative neural networks, a procedure known as generative pre-training.

Context

This concept has the prerequisites:

Goals

  • Know the graphical model structure of a DBN and understand what the combination of directed and undirected edges represents.
  • Understand why the explaining away effect makes exact inference in a DBN intractable.
  • Know how to train a DBN in a layerwise fashion.
  • Optional: understand mathematically why layerwise training is guaranteed to improve the likelihood.

Core resources (read/watch one of the following)

-Free-

Learning deep architectures for AI (2009)
A review paper on deep learning techniques written by one of the leaders in the field.
Author: Yoshua Bengio
Other notes:
  • Skim chapters 3 and 4 for motivation
Coursera: Neural Networks for Machine Learning (2012)
An online course by Geoff Hinton, who invented many of the core ideas behind neural nets and deep learning.
Author: Geoffrey E. Hinton
Other notes:
  • You may want to skim the lectures on learning sigmoid belief nets (Lecture13)
A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets (2006)
The research paper which introduced layerwise training of DBNs.
Authors: Geoffrey E. Hinton,Simon Osindero,Yee-Whye Teh

Supplemental resources (the following are optional, but you may find them useful)

-Paid-

See also