Approximate Inference via Clustering

In recent years, large-scale Bayesian learning draws a great deal of attention. However, in big-data era, the amount of data we face is growing much faster than our ability to deal with it. Fortunately, it is observed that large-scale datasets usually own rich internal structure and is somewhat redundant. In this paper, we attempt to simplify the Bayesian posterior via exploiting this structure. Specifically, we restrict our interest to the so-called well-clustered datasets and construct an approximate posterior according to the clustering information. Fortunately, the clustering structure can be efficiently obtained via a particular clustering algorithm. When constructing the approximate posterior, the data points in the same cluster are all replaced by the centroid of the cluster. As a result, the posterior can be significantly simplified. Theoretically, we show that under certain conditions the approximate posterior we construct is close (measured by KL divergence) to the exact posterior. Furthermore, thorough experiments are conducted to validate the fact that the constructed posterior is a good approximation to the true posterior and much easier to sample from.