At ICML last year, Ciwan Ceylan and Michael Gutmann presented a new version of noise constrative estimation to deal with intractable constants. While noise contrastive estimation relies upon a second independent sample to contrast with the observed sample, this approach uses instead a perturbed or noisy version of the original sample, for instance a Normal generation centred at the original datapoint. And eliminates the annoying constant by breaking the (original and noisy) samples into two groups. The probability to belong to one group or the other then does not depend on the constant, which is a very effective trick. And can be optimised with respect to the parameters of the model of interest. Recovering the score matching function of Hyvärinen (2005). While this is in line with earlier papers by Gutmann and Hyvärinen, this line of reasoning (starting with Charlie Geyer’s logistic regression) never ceases to amaze me!
Books, Charlie Geyer, conference, ICML 2018, intractable constant, logistic regression, machine learning, noise contrasting estimation, pictures, Statistics, Stockholm, Sweden, University life