Summary:

Continues a discussion with @avehtari from here. Distilled down: full-rank ADVI is constrained by memory. The mean-field approximation can be problematic for certain models. A sensible intermediate (a low-rank implementation) for certain models would be very helpful. Ong et al. (2017) described one possible implementation.

Description:

I'll briefly outline the mathematical approach of Ong et al., and leave the Stan-specific implementation details (most of which were kindly outlined in the preceding discussion) for the pull request. To generate the parameters of the model: if n is the dimension of the parameters, and r is the desired rank of our approximation, we draw eta = (z, eps) from the r + n dimensional identity Gaussian. Then zeta is distributed according to N(mu, BB^T + diag(d^2)) where mu and d are n-dimensional and B is n x r and constrained to be lower-triangular, and can be obtained from eta by the reparameterization trick with the formula zeta = mu + Bz + d * eps. zeta is then transformed to the model parameters according to ADVI.

Additional info:

I've started working on an implementation and will open a PR now.

Current Version:

v2.19.1