Structured Neural Networks for Density Estimation

Given prior knowledge on the conditional independence structure of observed variables, often in the form of Bayesian networks or directed acyclic graphs, it is beneficial to encode such structure into neural networks during learning. This is particularly advantageous in tasks such as density estimation and generative modelling when data is scarce. We propose the Structured Neural Network (StrNN), which masks specific pathways in a neural network. The masks are designed via a novel relationship we explore between neural network architectures and binary matrix factorization, to ensure that the desired conditional independencies are respected and predefined objectives are explicitly optimized. We devise and study practical algorithms for this otherwise NP-hard design problem. We demonstrate the utility of StrNN in by applying StrNN to binary and Gaussian density estimation tasks. Our work opens up new avenues for applications such as data-efficient generative modeling with autoregressive flows and causal inference.