Discrete Restricted Boltzmann Machines

A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a probabilistic graphical model with bipartite interactions between an observed set and a hidden set of units [see Smolensky, 1986, Freund and Haussler, 1991, Hinton, 2002, 2010]. A characterizing property of these models is that the observed units are independent given the states of the hidden units and vice versa. This is a consequence of the bipartiteness of the interaction graph and does not depend on the units' state spaces. Typically RBMs are defined with binary units, but other types of units have also been considered, including continuous, discrete, and mixed type units [see Welling et al., 2005, Marks and Movellan, 2001, Salakhutdinov et al., 2007, Dahl et al., 2012, Tran et al., 2011]. We study discrete RBMs, also called multinomial or softmax RBMs, which are special types of exponential family harmoniums [Welling et al., 2005].