Latent Variable Modelling Using Variational Autoencoders: A survey

A probability distribution allows practitioners to uncover hidden structure in the data and build models to solve supervised learning problems using limited data. The focus of this report is on Variational autoencoders, a method to learn the probability distribution of large complex datasets. The report provides a theoretical understanding of variational autoencoders and consolidates the current research in the field. The report is divided into multiple chapters, the first chapter introduces the problem, describes variational autoencoders and identifies key research directions in the field. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 dive into the details of each of the key research areas. Chapter 6 concludes the report and suggests directions for future work. A reader who has a basic idea of machine learning but wants to learn about general themes in machine learning research can benefit from the report. The report explains central ideas on learning probability distributions, what people did to make this tractable and goes into details around how deep learning is currently applied. The report also serves a gentle introduction for someone looking to contribute to this sub-field.