Deep Belief Network (DBN)
Stacked architectures of mostly RBMs or VAEs. These networks have been shown to be effectively trainable stack by stack, where each AE or RBM only has to learn to encode the previous network. This technique is also known as greedy training, where greedy means making locally optimal solutions to get to a decent but possibly not optimal answer. DBNs can be trained through contrastive divergence or back-propagation and learn to represent the data as a probabilistic model, just like regular RBMs or VAEs. Once trained or converged to a (more) stable state through unsupervised learning, the model can be used to generate new data. If trained with contrastive divergence, it can even classify existing data because the neurons have been taught to look for different features. Bengio, Yoshua, et al. “Greedy layer-wise training of deep networks.” Advances in neural information processing systems 19 (2007): 153.
