by Janos Kramar 1500 days ago | Jessica Taylor likes this | link | parent An easy way to get rid of the probabilities-outside-[0,1] problem in the continuous relaxation is to constrain the “conditional”/updated distribution to have $$\operatorname{Var}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)\leq \operatorname{E}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)\left(1-\operatorname{E}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)\right)$$ (which is a convex constraint; it’s equivalent to $$\operatorname{Var}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)+\left(\operatorname{E}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)-\frac{1}{2}\right)^2\leq \frac{1}{4}$$), and then minimize KL-divergence accordingly. The two obvious flaws are that the result of updating becomes ordering-dependent (though this may not be a problem in practice), and that the updated distribution will sometimes have $$\operatorname{Var}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)< \operatorname{E}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)\left(1-\operatorname{E}\left(1_{\varphi_i}\middle|\dots\right)\right)$$, and it’s not clear how to interpret that.

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