Gaussian-Bernoulli deep Boltzmann machine

In this paper, we study a model that we call Gaussian-Bernoulli deep Boltzmann machine (GDBM) and discuss potential improvements in training the model. GDBM is designed to be applicable to continuous data and it is constructed from Gaussian-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machine (GRBM) by adding multiple layers of binary hidden neurons. The studied improvements of the learning algorithm for GDBM include parallel tempering, enhanced gradient, adaptive learning rate and layer-wise pretraining. We empirically show that they help avoid some of the common difficulties found in training deep Boltzmann machines such as divergence of learning, the difficulty in choosing right learning rate scheduling, and the existence of meaningless higher layers.