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arXiv · 1802.02538

Yes, but Did It Work?: Evaluating Variational Inference

Yuling Yao·Aki Vehtari·Daniel Simpson·Andrew Gelman
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Abstract

While it's always possible to compute a variational approximation to a posterior distribution, it can be difficult to discover problems with this approximation. We propose two diagnostic algorithms to alleviate this problem. The Pareto-smoothed importance sampling (PSIS) diagnostic gives a goodness of fit measurement for joint distributions, while simultaneously improving the error in the estimate. The variational simulation-based calibration (VSBC) assesses the average performance of point estimates.

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Yuling Yao, Aki Vehtari, Daniel Simpson, Andrew Gelman. 2018-02-07. Yes, but Did It Work?: Evaluating Variational Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02538

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