Using Autodiff to Estimate Posterior Moments: Conclusion, Limitations, and References

Table of Links

• Abstract & Introduction
• Related work
• Background
• Methods
• Experiments
• "Conclusion, Limitations, and References"
• Derivations
• Algorithms
• Experimental Datasets And Model

Conclusion and Limitations

We gave a new and far simpler method for computing posterior moments, marginals and samples in massively parallel importance sampling based on differentiating a slightly modified marginal likelihood estimator.

The method has limitations, in that while it is considerably more effective than e.g. VI, HMC and global importance sampling, it is more complex. Additionally, at least a naive implementation may be quite costly in terms of memory consumption, limiting how the number of importance samples we can draw for each variable. That said, it should be possible to eliminate almost all of this overhead by careful optimizations to avoid allocating large intermediate tensors, following the strategy in KeOps (Charlier et al. 2021).

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