Variational Bayes: the intuition behind Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs)

The high computational cost of inferring from a complicated and often intractable, ‘true posterior distribution’ has always been a stumbling block in the Bayesian framework. However (and thankfully), there are certain inference techniques that are able to achieve a reasonable approximation of this intractable posterior with something… tractable. See what I did there?

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