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relating to methods or principles that involve finding the values of variables that optimize certain quantities, often by minimizing or maximizing functions
- Calculus of variations deals with problems of finding functions that optimize certain functionals.
- Variational principles are used in physics to derive equations of motion for systems by minimizing or maximizing action.
- Variational methods are employed in optimization algorithms to find solutions that minimize or maximize objective functions.
- In quantum mechanics, variational methods are used to approximate the ground state energy of quantum systems.
- Variational autoencoders are a type of neural network architecture used in machine learning for generative modeling.