Refs

In much of the following, I’m interchangeably using Θ and $z$.

ELBO Summary

image.png

image.png

image.png

image.png

Why latent variables

We want to model $p(X;\theta)$, but we also explicitly model latent variables/features $Z$.

Example: GMMs—for clustering, unsupervised learning

image.png

Another motivation:

image.png