Generative models

Abstract

This chapter presents an introduction to the important topic of building generative models. These are models that are aimed to understand the variety of a class such as cars or trees. A generative mode should be able to generate feature vectors for instances of the class they represent, and such models should therefore be able to characterize the class with all its variations. The subject is discussed both in a Bayesian and in a deep learning context, and also within a supervised and unsupervised context. This area is related to important algorithms such as k-means clustering, expectation maximization (EM), naïve Bayes, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and variational autoencoders (VAE).