Fourth Edinburgh Deep Learning Workshop, Edinburgh 2017

Unsupervised learning, in particular learning general nonlinear representations, is one of the deepest problems in machine learning. Estimating latent quantities in a generative model provides a principled framework, and has been successfully used in the linear case, e.g. with independent component analysis (ICA) and sparse coding. However, extending ICA to the nonlinear case has proven to be extremely difficult: A straight-forward extension is unidentifiable, i.e. it is not possible to recover those latent components that actually generated the data. Here, we show that this problem can be solved by using temporal structure. We formulate two generative models in which the data is an arbitrary but invertible nonlinear transformation of time series (components) which are statistically independent of each other.