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ICML
2004
IEEE

Variational methods for the Dirichlet process

14 years 4 months ago
Variational methods for the Dirichlet process
Variational inference methods, including mean field methods and loopy belief propagation, have been widely used for approximate probabilistic inference in graphical models. While often less accurate than MCMC, variational methods provide a fast deterministic approximation to marginal and conditional probabilities. Such approximations can be particularly useful in high dimensional problems where sampling methods are too slow to be effective. A limitation of current methods, however, is that they are restricted to parametric probabilistic models. MCMC does not have such a limitation; indeed, MCMC samplers have been developed for the Dirichlet process (DP), a nonparametric measure on measures (Ferguson, 1973) that is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric statistics (Escobar & West, 1995; Neal, 2000). In this paper, we develop a mean-field variational approach to approximate inference for the Dirichlet process, where the approximate posterior is based on the truncated stickbreakin...
David M. Blei, Michael I. Jordan
Added 17 Nov 2009
Updated 17 Nov 2009
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where ICML
Authors David M. Blei, Michael I. Jordan
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