A Particle Algorithm for Mean-Field Variational Inference

Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is coordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI), which relies crucially on parametric assumptions on complete conditionals. We introduce a novel particle-based algorithm for MFVI, named PArticle VI (PAVI), for nonparametric mean-field approximation. We obtain non-asymptotic error bounds for our algorithm. To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end guarantee for particle-based MFVI.

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