We investigate the ability of popular flow based methods to capture tail-properties of a target density by studying the increasing triangular maps used in these flow methods acting on a tractable source density. We show that the density quantile functions of the source and target density provide a precise characterization of the slope of transformation required to capture tails in a target density. We further show that any Lipschitz-continuous transport map acting on a source density will result in a density with similar tail properties as the source, highlighting the trade-off between a complex source density and a sufficiently expressive transformation to capture desirable properties of a target density. Subsequently, we illustrate that flow models like Real-NVP, MAF, and Glow as implemented originally lack the ability to capture a distribution with non-Gaussian tails. We circumvent this problem by proposing tail-adaptive flows consisting of a source distribution that can be learned simultaneously with the triangular map to capture tail-properties of a target density. We perform several synthetic and real-world experiments to compliment our theoretical findings.

Bibtex

@misc{jaini2019tails,
    title={Tails of Lipschitz Triangular Flows},
    author={Priyank Jaini and Ivan Kobyzev and Yaoliang Yu and Marcus Brubaker},
    year={2019},
    eprint={1907.04481},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={math.ST}
}

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