用相位型分布改进生成模型,更好捕捉极端事件的重尾数据。
Phase-Type Variational Autoencoders for Heavy-Tailed Data
- 用连续时间马尔可夫链定义灵活解码器,自动学习数据尾部特征
- 在合成与真实数据上显著优于高斯、t分布等传统解码器
- 适合处理极端风险建模,如金融或气候异常事件分析
重尾分布广泛存在于真实世界数据中,罕见但极端的事件主导了风险与变异性。标准变分自编码器(VAE)使用如高斯分布等简单解码器,难以捕捉重尾特性;现有重尾扩展方法受限于预定义参数族,尾部行为固定。本文提出相位型变分自编码器(PH-VAE),其解码器为条件依赖潜变量的相位型(PH)分布,定义为连续时间马尔可夫链(CTMC)的吸收时间。该形式融合多个指数时间尺度,构建灵活且解析可计算的解码器,能直接从数据中自适应学习有限范围内的尾部行为。在合成与真实基准测试中,PH-VAE准确逼近多种重尾分布,在建模尾部行为和极端分位数方面显著优于高斯、学生t分布及极值基VAE解码器。在多变量场景下,通过共享潜表示捕捉真实的跨维度尾部依赖。据我们所知,这是首个将相位型分布引入深度生成建模的工作,连接了应用概率与表征学习。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Heavy-tailed distributions are ubiquitous in real-world data, where rare but extreme events dominate risk and variability. However, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) employ simple decoder distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, that fail to capture heavy-tailed behavior, while existing heavy-tail-aware extensions remain restricted to predefined parametric families whose tail behavior is fixed a priori. We propose the Phase-Type Variational Autoencoder (PH-VAE), whose decoder distribution is a latent-conditioned Phase-Type (PH) distribution, defined as the absorption time of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). This formulation composes multiple exponential time scales, yielding a flexible and analytically tractable decoder that adapts its finite-range tail behavior directly from the observed data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PH-VAE accurately approximates diverse heavy-tailed distributions, significantly outperforming Gaussian, Student-t, and extreme-value-based VAE decoders in modeling observed tail behavior and extreme quantiles. In multivariate settings, PH-VAE captures realistic cross-dimensional tail dependence through its shared latent representation. To our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate Phase-Type distributions into deep generative modeling, bridging applied probability and representation learning.
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