방법 비교

	다수준 변분 추론	변분 추론
분야	베이지안	베이지안
계열	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods
기원 연도	2016	1999
창시자	Ranganath, Altosaar, Tran, Blei (hierarchical VI formalization, 2016); Blei et al. (VI framework, 2017)	Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola & Saul
유형	approximate Bayesian inference	Approximate Bayesian inference
원전	Blei, D. M., Kucukelbir, A., & McAuliffe, J. D. (2017). Variational inference: A review for statisticians. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 112(518), 859-877.	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.
별칭	hierarchical variational inference, multilevel VI, variational Bayes for multilevel models, MLVI	VI, variational Bayes, VB, mean-field variational inference
관련	4	4
요약	Multilevel variational inference (MLVI) is a scalable approximate Bayesian method that fits hierarchical (multilevel) models by optimizing a variational approximation to the posterior, rather than drawing MCMC samples. It exploits the grouped structure of multilevel data — individuals nested within groups, groups nested within higher-level units — to derive efficient coordinate-wise updates, making Bayesian inference tractable for large clustered datasets.	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.