Identity Trick#
I think the slides from the MLSS 2018 meeting is the only place that I have encountered anyone actually explicitly mentioning this Identity trick.
Given an integral problem:
\[p(x) = \int p(x|z)p(z)dz\]
I can multiply by an arbitrary distribution which is equivalent to 1.
\[p(x)=\int p(x|z) p(z) \frac{q(z)}{q(z)}dz\]
Then I can regroup and reweight the integral
\[p(x) = \int p(x|z)\frac{p(z)}{q(z)}q(z)dz\]
This results in a different expectation that we initially had
\[p(x) = \underset{q(z)}{\mathbb{E}}\left[ p(x|z)\frac{p(z)}{q(z)} \right]\]
Examples:
Importance Sampling
Manipulate Stochastic gradients
Derive Probability bounds
RL for policy corrections