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	Inferenza Variazionale	Regressione Bayesiana	Expectation Propagation (EP)	Catena di Markov Monte Carlo (MCMC)
Campo	Bayesiano	Bayesiano	Bayesiano	Bayesiano
Famiglia	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods
Anno di origine	1999	—	2001	—
Ideatore	Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola & Saul	—	Thomas P. Minka	—
Tipo	Approximate Bayesian inference	Bayesian linear model	Approximate inference algorithm	Posterior sampling algorithm
Fonte seminale	Jordan, M. I., Ghahramani, Z., Jaakkola, T. S., & Saul, L. K. (1999). An introduction to variational methods for graphical models. Machine Learning, 37(2), 183–233.	Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S., Dunson, D. B., Vehtari, A. & Rubin, D. B. (2013). Bayesian Data Analysis (3rd ed.). CRC Press. ISBN: 978-1439840955	Minka, T. P. (2001). Expectation propagation for approximate Bayesian inference. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-01), pp. 362–369. Morgan Kaufmann.	Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S., Dunson, D. B., Vehtari, A. & Rubin, D. B. (2013). Bayesian Data Analysis (3rd ed.). CRC Press. ISBN: 978-1439840955
Alias	VI, variational Bayes, VB, mean-field variational inference	bayesian linear regression, probabilistic regression, bayesian regresyon	EP, expectation propagation, EP algorithm, assumed-density filtering generalisation	markov chain monte carlo, MCMC sampling, MCMC (Markov Zinciri Monte Carlo)
Correlati	4	2	3	3
Sintesi	Variational inference (VI) is a family of techniques that turn Bayesian posterior computation into an optimisation problem. Instead of drawing samples from the exact posterior — as Markov chain Monte Carlo does — VI posits a simpler, tractable family of distributions and finds the member of that family closest to the true posterior by maximising the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Introduced in its modern graphical-model form by Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola and Saul (1999) and given a comprehensive statistical treatment by Blei, Kucukelbir and McAuliffe (2017), VI is now the standard scalable inference engine in probabilistic machine learning.	Bayesian regression is a probabilistic version of linear regression that treats the model parameters as uncertain quantities. Instead of returning a single best-fit estimate, it combines prior knowledge with the observed data to produce a full posterior probability distribution for each parameter, from which credible intervals and predictions are read off.	Expectation Propagation (EP) is a deterministic message-passing algorithm for approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models, introduced by Thomas P. Minka at UAI 2001. It iteratively refines a set of local approximate factors — each drawn from the exponential family — so that their product closely matches the true intractable posterior, achieving higher accuracy than mean-field variational inference on many probabilistic machine learning tasks.	Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a family of computational algorithms for sampling from complex probability distributions, most commonly the posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian inference. Rather than computing posteriors analytically — which is rarely possible for realistic models — MCMC constructs a Markov chain whose stationary distribution is the target posterior and draws dependent samples from it, enabling full probabilistic inference for virtually any model.