{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/fixed-form-variational-posterior","title":"Fixed-Form Variational Posterior Approximation through Stochastic Linear Regression","arxiv_id":"1206.6679","date":"2012-06-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tim Salimans","David A. Knowles"],"abstract":"We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian\nposterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler\ndivergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior\ndistribution. Our method can be used to approximate any posterior distribution,\nprovided that it is given in closed form up to the proportionality constant.\nThe approximation can be any distribution in the exponential family or any\nmixture of such distributions, which means that it can be made arbitrarily\nprecise. Several examples illustrate the speed and accuracy of our\napproximation method in practice.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.6679v6","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.6679v6.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"fixed-form-variational-posterior","repo_url":"https://github.com/TimSalimans/LinRegVB","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"fixed-form-variational-posterior","repo_url":"https://github.com/ngiann/ApproximateVI.jl","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"form","task_name":"Form"},{"task_slug":"regression-1","task_name":"regression"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1206.6679","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}