Topic summary
Variational Bayes
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Variational Bayesian methods.
Variational Bayes can be seen as an extension of the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm from maximum likelihood (ML) or maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation of the single most probable value of each parameter to fully Bayesian estimation which computes (an approximation to) the entire posterior distribution of the parameters and latent variables. As in EM, it finds a set of optimal parameter values, and it has the same alternating structure as does EM, based on a set of interlocked (mutually dependent) equations that cannot be solved analytically.