Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 2005)
Jason Palmer, Kenneth Kreutz-Delgado, Bhaskar Rao, David Wipf
We consider criteria for variational representations of non-Gaussian latent variables, and derive variational EM algorithms in general form. We establish a general equivalence among convex bounding methods, evidence based methods, and ensemble learning/Variational Bayes methods, which has previously been demonstrated only for particular cases.