English

Particle Filter Recurrent Neural Networks

Machine Learning 2019-12-03 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been extraordinarily successful for prediction with sequential data. To tackle highly variable and noisy real-world data, we introduce Particle Filter Recurrent Neural Networks (PF-RNNs), a new RNN family that explicitly models uncertainty in its internal structure: while an RNN relies on a long, deterministic latent state vector, a PF-RNN maintains a latent state distribution, approximated as a set of particles. For effective learning, we provide a fully differentiable particle filter algorithm that updates the PF-RNN latent state distribution according to the Bayes rule. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed PF-RNNs outperform the corresponding standard gated RNNs on a synthetic robot localization dataset and 10 real-world sequence prediction datasets for text classification, stock price prediction, etc.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.12885,
  title  = {Particle Filter Recurrent Neural Networks},
  author = {Xiao Ma and Peter Karkus and David Hsu and Wee Sun Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12885},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted to AAAI 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:32:44.462Z