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<p>The CmdStan method <code>variational</code> uses the Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) algorithm of <span class="citation">Kucukelbir et al. (<a href="#ref-kucukelbir:2017" role="doc-biblioref">2017</a>)</span>
to provide an approximate posterior distribution of the model conditioned on the data.
The approximating distribution it uses is a Ga