(not quite covered in the chapter)

Introduction


Instead of using ELBO, we may choose to estimate the multi-dimensional integral directly using MCMC. MCMC can be combined with many other techniques (for instance, MCMC-EM is a thing).

Unlike what Chapter 19 focuses on, there are other approximation techniques for dealing with intractable/hard-to-compute posteriors.

Here we include some sampling-based methods.

Resources


Slides: Approximate Inference in Bayes Nets - Sampling based methods

Slides: Approximate inference — touches on sampling methods after talking about Variational Inference

MCMC - Wikipedia

Markov chain Monte Carlo - Wikipedia

Slides: Generalized EM with Gibbs Sampling

Discussion