19.2 Applications

• Dimension reduction by using the encoder function.

• Anomaly detection by using the reconstruction error (like MSE) as an anomaly score to detect anomalies.

• Noise reduction by applying random noise to the input and asking the mode to recall the original (uncorrupted) input which forces the model focus its attention on the bigger picture.

• Information retrieval is the science of searching for information and auto-encoders can be used to:

  • Compress the text of web pages into a more compact vector representation

  • Generate meta tags, snippets, and descriptions for web pages using the page content

  • Identify keywords and important concepts within the content of web pages

  • Remove noise from the textual data of web pages

• Generative modeling \(P(X|Y=y)\) by using the decoder.