Book Image

Enhancing Deep Learning with Bayesian Inference

By : Matt Benatan, Jochem Gietema, Marian Schneider
Book Image

Enhancing Deep Learning with Bayesian Inference

By: Matt Benatan, Jochem Gietema, Marian Schneider

Overview of this book

Deep learning has an increasingly significant impact on our lives, from suggesting content to playing a key role in mission- and safety-critical applications. As the influence of these algorithms grows, so does the concern for the safety and robustness of the systems which rely on them. Simply put, typical deep learning methods do not know when they don’t know. The field of Bayesian Deep Learning contains a range of methods for approximate Bayesian inference with deep networks. These methods help to improve the robustness of deep learning systems as they tell us how confident they are in their predictions, allowing us to take more in how we incorporate model predictions within our applications. Through this book, you will be introduced to the rapidly growing field of uncertainty-aware deep learning, developing an understanding of the importance of uncertainty estimation in robust machine learning systems. You will learn about a variety of popular Bayesian Deep Learning methods, and how to implement these through practical Python examples covering a range of application scenarios. By the end of the book, you will have a good understanding of Bayesian Deep Learning and its advantages, and you will be able to develop Bayesian Deep Learning models for safer, more robust deep learning systems.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

4.3 BDL fundamentals

Throughout the rest of the book, we will introduce a range of methods necessary to make BDL possible. There are a number of common themes present through these methods. We’ll cover these here, so that we have a good understanding of these concepts when we encounter them later on.

These concepts include the following:

  • Gaussian assumptions: With many BDL methods, we use Gaussian assumptions to make things computationally tractable

  • Uncertainty sources: We’ll take a look at the different sources of uncertainty, and how we can determine the contributions of these sources for some BDL methods

  • Likelihoods: We were introduced to likelihoods in Chapter 2, Fundamentals of Bayesian Inference, and here we’ll learn more about the importance of likelihood as a metric for evaluating the calibration of probabilistic models

Let’s look at each of these in the following subsections.

4.3.1 Gaussian assumptions

In the ideal case described previously...