Building a generative model

We will use a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) as a generator factory. The VAE is based on an example in the Tensorflow documentation, kept simple, for speed: the generator and encoder are 5-layer convolutional neural nets.

The structure of the VAE used to train the generator

We train the VAE on 40-years of daily temperature anomalies from ERA5.

• Get the training data
• Convert the training data to tf tensors
• Package the tensors into a tf Dataset
• Specify the VAE
• Train the VAE
• Validate the trained VAE