An Ordering of Divergences for Variational Inference with Factorized Gaussian Approximations

Given an intractable distribution p, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to compute the best approximation q from some more tractable family 𝒬. Most commonly the approximation is found by minimizing a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, there exist other valid choices of divergences, and when 𝒬 does not contain p, each divergence champions a different solution. We analyze how the choice of divergence affects the outcome of VI when a Gaussian with a dense covariance matrix is approximated by a Gaussian with a diagonal covariance matrix. In this setting we show that different divergences can be ordered by the amount that their variational approximations misestimate various measures of uncertainty, such as the variance, precision, and entropy. We also derive an impossibility theorem showing that no two of these measures can be simultaneously matched by a factorized approximation; hence, the choice of divergence informs which measure, if any, is correctly estimated. Our analysis covers the KL divergence, the Rényi divergences, and a score-based divergence that compares ∇log p and ∇log q. We empirically evaluate whether these orderings hold when VI is used to approximate non-Gaussian distributions.