Things I learn when I read random stuff.
We note that the lower-dimensional space is stochastic.
What does being stochastic mean - Stochastic means that the particular process involves randomness to it.
In a VAE the bottleneck is stochastic as the encoder outputs a Gaussian distribution with a mean and std. While the bottleneck in a normal Autoencoder is deterministic.
Why is Gaussian distribution so popular?
Gaussian Distribution- The Gaussian distribution looks like a bell curve, and it’s defined by two parameters:
Mean and Standard deviation
Central Limit Theorem - When you add up a large number of independent, random variables, regardless of their original distribution, their sum or average tends to follow a normal distribution.
Because of CLT, we can justify using Gaussian models even when underlying data isn’t Gaussian.