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Predicting attendance at events is important for efficient facility management and marketing to maximize crowds. Most work date conducted the aggregate level; however, large crowd size being predicted often means individual decisions are masked. In many markets, increased nonattendance by season ticket holders (STHs) reported, which troubling given they have prepaid expected be highly loyal. To...

We introduce the Variational Hölder (VH) bound as an alternative to Variational Bayes (VB) for approximate Bayesian inference. Unlike VB which typically involves maximization of a non-convex lower bound with respect to the variational parameters, the VH bound involves minimization of a convex upper bound to the intractable integral with respect to the variational parameters. Minimization of the...