Truncated Variational EM for Semi-Supervised Neural Simpletrons

Inference and learning for probabilistic generative networks is often very challenging and typically prevents scalability to as large networks as used for deep discriminative approaches. To obtain efficiently trainable, large-scale and well performing generative networks for semi-supervised learning, we here combine two recent developments: a neural network reformulation of hierarchical Poisson mixtures (Neural Simpletrons), and a novel truncated variational EM approach (TV-EM). TV-EM provides theoretical guarantees for learning in generative networks, and its application to Neural Simpletrons results in particularly compact, yet approximately optimal, modifications of learning equations. If applied to standard benchmarks, we empirically find, that learning converges in fewer EM iterations, that the complexity per EM iteration is reduced, and that final likelihood values are higher on average. For the task of classification on data sets with few labels, learning improvements result in consistently lower error rates if compared to applications without truncation. Experiments on the MNIST data set herein allow for comparison to standard and state-of-the-art models in the semi-supervised setting. Further experiments on the NIST SD19 data set show the scalability of the approach when a manifold of additional unlabeled data is available

Cause Identification of Electromagnetic Transient Events using Spatiotemporal Feature Learning

This paper presents a spatiotemporal unsupervised feature learning method for cause identification of electromagnetic transient events (EMTE) in power grids. The proposed method is formulated based on the availability of time-synchronized high-frequency measurement, and using the convolutional neural network (CNN) as the spatiotemporal feature representation along with softmax function. Despite the existing threshold-based, or energy-based events analysis methods, such as support vector machine (SVM), autoencoder, and tapered multi-layer perception (t-MLP) neural network, the proposed feature learning is carried out with respect to both time and space. The effectiveness of the proposed feature learning and the subsequent cause identification is validated through the EMTP simulation of different events such as line energization, capacitor bank energization, lightning, fault, and high-impedance fault in the IEEE 30-bus, and the real-time digital simulation (RTDS) of the WSCC 9-bus system.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure