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Sampling: Two Basic Algorithms

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In probabilistic machine learning, exact inference is often difficult or impossible when we cannot sample from or estimate the properties of a particular distribution. While we can leverage conjugacy to keep the distributions tractable or use variational inference to deterministically approximate a density, we can also use randomized methods for inference using numerical sampling, sometimes called Monte Carlo methods.

Introduction In probabilistic machine learning, exact inference is often difficult or impossible when we cannot sample from or estimate the properties of a particular distribution. While we can leverage conjugacy to keep the distributions tractable or use variational inference to deterministically approximate a density, we can also use randomized methods for inference using numerical sampling, sometimes called Monte Carlo methods. While we are sometimes interested in a posterior distribution per se, we are often only interested in properties of the distribution. For example, we need the…

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