Efficient Methods for Unsupervised Learning of Probabilistic Models

Interpreting neural spike trains, compressing video, identifying features in DNA microarrays, and recognizing particles in high energy physics all rely upon the ability to find and model complex structure in a high dimensional space. Despite their great promise, high dimensional probabilistic models are frequently computationally intractable to work with in practice. In this thesis I develop solutions to overcome this intractability, primarily in the context of energy based models. A common cause of intractability is that model distributions cannot be analytically normalized. Probabilities can only be computed up to a constant, making training exceedingly difficult. To solve this problem I propose'minimum probability flow learning', a variational technique for parameter estimation in such models.