2018/11/06 by Bo Dai, Dai, Bo, Hanjun Dai +9
Computer Science · Mathematics · #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Statistical Methods and Inference
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1811.02228
openalex publication_date 2018/11/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate penalized maximum log-likelihood estimation for exponential family distributions whose natural parameter resides in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Key to our approach is a novel technique, doubly dual embedding, that avoids computation of the partition function. This technique also allows the development of a flexible sampling strategy that amortizes the cost of Monte-Carlo sampling in the inference stage. The resulting estimator can be easily generalized to kernel conditional exponential families. We establish a connection between kernel exponential family estimation and MMD-GANs, revealing a new perspective for understanding GANs. Compared to the score matching based estimators, the proposed method improves both memory and time efficiency while enjoying stronger statistical properties, such as fully capturing smoothness in its statistical convergence rate while the score matching estimator appears to saturate. Finally, we show that the proposed estimator empirically outperforms state-of-the-art