A mixed effects least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) classifier is introduced to extend the standard LS-SVM classifier for handling longitudinal data. The mixed effects LS-SVM model contains a random intercept and allows to classify highly unbalanced data, in the sense that there is an...

Variational methods for approximate Bayesian inference provide fast, flexible, deterministic alternatives to Monte Carlo methods. Unfortunately, unlike Monte Carlo methods, variational approximations cannot, in general, be made to be arbitrarily accurate. This paper develops grid-based...