What makes the posterior intractable?
Pergunta
In the setting of Variational AutoEncoders, i.e. when we want to find the posterior distribution
over the data generating, latent variable z
, given some observations x
, what exactly (which part of the equation) makes this posterior distribution intractable and why?
Cheers
Solução
It's usually the denominator $p(x)$ (the "evidence") which is intractable. You could attempt to compute it by marginalizing over the latent variable $p(x) = \int p(x|z)p(z)dz$. However, you would need to evaluate all possible values of $z$ which would require exponential time. (That's why in maximium-likelihood estimation you have no intractability problem because you can treat the evidence as a constant.)
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