A new method for parameter estimation in probabilistic models: Minimum probability flow
Machine Learning
2020-07-21 v1 Machine Learning
Abstract
Fitting probabilistic models to data is often difficult, due to the general intractability of the partition function. We propose a new parameter fitting method, Minimum Probability Flow (MPF), which is applicable to any parametric model. We demonstrate parameter estimation using MPF in two cases: a continuous state space model, and an Ising spin glass. In the latter case it outperforms current techniques by at least an order of magnitude in convergence time with lower error in the recovered coupling parameters.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.09240,
title = {A new method for parameter estimation in probabilistic models: Minimum probability flow},
author = {Jascha Sohl-Dickstein and Peter Battaglino and Michael R. DeWeese},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.09240},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Originally published 2011. Uploaded to arXiv 2020. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0906.4779, arXiv:1205.4295