Probabilistic Modeling: From Mixture Models to Probabilistic Circuits

Let us imagine cats. Most people like cats, and some people are crazy in love with cats. There are ginger cats, black cats, big cats, small cats, puffy cats, and furless cats. In fact, there are many different kinds of cats. However, when I say this word: “a cat,” everyone has some kind of a cat in their mind. One can close eyes and generate a picture of a cat, either their own cat or a cat of a neighbor. Further, this generated cat is located somewhere, e.g., sleeping on a couch or in a garden chasing a fly, during the night or during the day, and so on. Probably, we can agree at this point that there are infinitely many possible scenarios of cats in some environments.