Topic 0: Deep Generative Models
What does "Generative" mean in Deep Generative Models?
"Generative" describes a class of statistical models that contrasts with discriminative models.
Informally:
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Generative models can generate new data instances.
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Discriminative models discriminate between different kinds of data instances.
Example: A generative model could generate new photos of animals that look like real animals, while a discriminative model could tell a dog from a cat.
More formally, given a set of data instances X and a set of labels Y:
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Generative models capture the joint probability p(X, Y), or just p(X) if there are no labels.
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Discriminative models capture the conditional probability p(Y | X).