%0 Journal Article
%A Gallego, Víctor
%A Rios Insua, David
%T Variationally inferred sampling through a refined bound
%D 2021
%@ 1099-4300
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/7298
%X In this work, a framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic models is introduced by embedding a Markov chain sampler within a variational posterior approximation. We call this framework “refined variational approximation”. Its strengths are its ease of implementation and the automatic tuning of sampler parameters, leading to a faster mixing time through automatic differentiation. Several strategies to approximate evidence lower bound (ELBO) computation are also introduced. Its efficient performance is showcased experimentally using statespace models for time-series data, a variational encoder for density estimation and a conditional variational autoencoder as a deep Bayes classifier.
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