7
Why learning is hard in a sigmoid belief net.
• To learn W, we need the posterior
distribution in the first hidden layer.
• Problem 1: The posterior is typically
intractable because of “explaining
away”.
• Problem 2: The posterior depends
on the prior created by higher layers
as well as the likelihood.
– So to learn W, we need to know
the weights in higher layers, even
if we are only approximating the
posterior. All the weights interact.
• Problem 3: We need to integrate
over all possible configurations of
the higher variables to get the prior
for first hidden layer. Yuk!
hidden variables
hidden variables
prior
hidden variables
  likelihood
W
          data