Title: End-to-End Learning for the Deep Multivariate Probit Model,
Abstract: The multivariate probit model (MVP) is a popular classic model for studying
binary responses of multiple entities. Nevertheless, the computational
challenge of learning the MVP model, given that its likelihood involves
integrating over a multidimensional constrained space of latent variables,
significantly limits its application in practice. We propose a flexible deep
generalization of the classic MVP, the Deep Multivariate Probit Model (DMVP),
which is an end-to-end learning scheme that uses an efficient parallel sampling
process of the multivariate probit model to exploit GPU-boosted deep neural
networks. We present both theoretical and empirical analysis of the convergence
behavior of DMVP's sampling process with respect to the resolution of the
correlation structure. We provide convergence guarantees for DMVP and our
empirical analysis demonstrates the advantages of DMVP's sampling compared with
standard MCMC-based methods. We also show that when applied to multi-entity
modelling problems, which are natural DMVP applications, DMVP trains faster
than classical MVP, by at least an order of magnitude, captures rich
correlations among entities, and further improves the joint likelihood of
entities compared with several competitive models.