Continuous Sigmoidal Belief Networks Trained using Slice Sampling
Brendan J. Frey · 1996
Real-valued random hidden variables can be useful for modelling latent structure that explains correlations among observed variables. I propose a simple unit that adds zero-mean Gaussian noise to its input before passing it through a sigmoidal squashing function. Such units can produce a variety of useful behaviors, ranging from deterministic to binary stochastic to continuous stochastic. I show how "slice sampling" can be used for inference and learning in top-down networks of these units and demonstrate learning on two simple problems. 1 Introduction A variety of unsupervised connectionist models containing discrete-valued hidden units have been developed. These include Boltzmann machines (Hinton and Sejnowski 1986), binary sigmoidal belief networks (Neal 1992) and Helmholtz machines (Hinton et al. 1995; Dayan et al. 1995). However, some hidden variables, such as translation or scaling in images of shapes, are best represented using continuous values. Continuous-valued Bolt...