Sampling methods for statistical inference

Several important sampling methods used in Bayesian statistics

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Main obstacles of Bayesian statistics or Bayesian machine learning is computing posterior distribution. In many contexts, computing posterior distribution is intractable. Today, there are two main stream to detour directly computing posterior distribution. One is using sampling method(ex. MCMC) and another is Variational inference. Compared to Variational inference, MCMC takes more time and vulnerable to high-dimensional parameters. However, MCMC has strength in simplicity and guarantees of convergence. I’ll briefly introduce several methods people using in application.