Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a family of deep generative models with use cases that span many applications, from image processing to bioinformatics. There are two complimentary ways of viewing the VAE: as a probabilistic model that is fit using variational Bayesian inference, or as a type of autoencoding neural network. In this post, we present the mathematical theory behind VAEs, which is rooted in Bayesian inference, and how this theory leads to an emergent autoencoding algorithm. We...
