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Mean Field Theory for Sigmoid Belief Networks

L. K. Saul·T. Jaakkola·M. I. Jordan
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Abstract

We develop a mean field theory for sigmoid belief networks based on ideas from statistical mechanics. Our mean field theory provides a tractable approximation to the true probability distribution in these networks; it also yields a lower bound on the likelihood of evidence. We demonstrate the utility of this framework on a benchmark problem in statistical pattern recognition---the classification of handwritten digits.

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L. K. Saul, T. Jaakkola, M. I. Jordan. 1996-03-01. Mean Field Theory for Sigmoid Belief Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/9603102

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