The explicit form of expectation propagation for a simple statistical model

Abstract

We derive the explicit form of expectation propagation for approximate deterministic Bayesian inference in a simple statistical model. The model corresponds to a random sample from the Normal distribution. The explicit forms, and their derivation, allow a deeper understanding of the issues and challenges involved in practical implementation of expectation propagation for statistical analyses. No auxiliary approximations are used: we follow the expectation propagation prescription exactly. A simulation study shows expectation propagation to be more accurate than mean field variational Bayes for larger sample sizes, but at the cost of considerably more algebraic and computational effort.