On Statistical Optimality of Variational Bayes
The article addresses a long-standing open problem on the justification of using variational Bayes methods for parameter estimation. We provide general conditions for obtaining optimal risk bounds for point estimates acquired from mean-field variational Bayesian inference. The conditions pertain to the existence of certain test functions for the distance metric on the parameter space and minimal assumptions on the prior. A general recipe for verification of the conditions is outlined which is broadly applicable to existing Bayesian models with or without latent variables. As illustrations, specific applications to Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Gaussian mixture models are discussed.
PDF AbstractTasks
Datasets
Add Datasets
introduced or used in this paper
Results from the Paper
Submit
results from this paper
to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the
community compare results to other papers.
Methods
No methods listed for this paper. Add
relevant methods here
