Nonparametric estimation of conditional probability distributions using a generative approach based on conditional push-forward neural networks
Lorenzo Tedesco (University of Bergamo)
Wednesday 25th March 12:30-13:00
Maths 311B
Abstract
We introduce Conditional Push-Forward Neural Networks (CPFN), a generative framework for estimating conditional distributions. Instead of directly modeling the conditional density, the method learns a stochastic transformation that, starting from a suitably chosen latent random vector, produces samples that approximately follow the same distribution as the observed data given a certain input. This approach enables efficient conditional sampling and straightforward estimation of conditional statistics via Monte Carlo methods. The model is trained using an objective function derived from the Kullback-Leibler divergence, without requiring invertibility or adversarial training. We also establish a near-asymptotic consistency result and demonstrate experimentally that CPFN can achieve performance comparable to, or even better than, state-of-the-art methods, including kernel estimators, tree-based algorithms, and popular deep learning techniques, while remaining lightweight and easy to train.
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