เปรียบเทียบวิธี

	การอนุมานแบบแปรผัน	การแพร่กระจายความคาดหวัง (EP)
สาขาวิชา	เบย์	เบย์
ตระกูล	Bayesian methods	Bayesian methods
ปีกำเนิด	1999	2001
ผู้ริเริ่ม	Jordan, Ghahramani, Jaakkola & Saul	Thomas P. Minka
ประเภท	Approximate Bayesian inference	Approximate inference algorithm
แหล่งต้นตำรับ	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.	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.
ชื่อเรียกอื่น	VI, variational Bayes, VB, mean-field variational inference	EP, expectation propagation, EP algorithm, assumed-density filtering generalisation
ที่เกี่ยวข้อง	4	3
สรุป	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.	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.