eXponential FAmily Dynamical Systems (XFADS): Large-scale nonlinear Gaussian state-space modeling

State-space graphical models and the variational autoencoder framework provide a principled apparatus for learning dynamical systems from data. State-of-the-art probabilistic approaches are often able to scale to large problems at the cost of flexibility of the variational posterior or expressivity of the dynamics model. However, those consolidations can be detrimental if the ultimate goal is to learn a generative model capable of explaining the spatiotemporal structure of the data and making accurate forecasts. We introduce a low-rank structured variational autoencoding framework for nonlinear Gaussian state-space graphical models capable of capturing dense covariance structures that are important for learning dynamical systems with predictive capabilities. Our inference algorithm exploits the covariance structures that arise naturally from sample based approximate Gaussian message passing and low-rank amortized posterior updates -- effectively performing approximate variational smoothing with time complexity scaling linearly in the state dimensionality. In comparisons with other deep state-space model architectures our approach consistently demonstrates the ability to learn a more predictive generative model. Furthermore, when applied to neural physiological recordings, our approach is able to learn a dynamical system capable of forecasting population spiking and behavioral correlates from a small portion of single trials.