The gradient of the cost function also demonstrates why gradients of unsupervised, generative models must be computed differently from for those of for example FNNs. While the data-dependent expectation value is easily calculated based on the samples \( \boldsymbol{x}_i \) in the training data, we must sample from the model in order to generate samples from which to caclulate the model-dependent term. We sample from the model by using MCMC-based methods. We can not sample from the model directly because the partition function \( Z \) is generally intractable.
As in supervised machine learning problems, the goal is also here to perform well on unseen data, that is to have good generalization from the training data. The distribution \( f(x) \) we approximate is not the true distribution we wish to estimate, it is limited to the training data. Hence, in unsupervised training as well it is important to prevent overfitting to the training data. Thus it is common to add regularizers to the cost function in the same manner as we discussed for say linear regression.