{"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/note-on-the-bias-and-variance-of-variational","title":"Note on the bias and variance of variational inference","arxiv_id":"1906.03708","date":"2019-06-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chin-wei Huang","Aaron Courville"],"abstract":"In this note, we study the relationship between the variational gap and the variance of the (log) likelihood ratio. We show that the gap can be upper bounded by some form of dispersion measure of the likelihood ratio, which suggests the bias of variational inference can be reduced by making the distribution of the likelihood ratio more concentrated, such as via averaging and variance reduction.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03708v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.03708v1.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":"note-on-the-bias-and-variance-of-variational","repo_url":"https://github.com/CW-Huang/HIWAE","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"variational-inference","task_name":"Variational Inference"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/1906.03708","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1906.03708","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}