marginalize out

verb

The act of discarding a subset of random variables from a probability distribution to find the marginal distribution.

Meanings

verbmarginalize out (third-person singular simple present marginalizes out, present participle marginalizing out, simple past and past participle marginalized out)

present singular third person marginalizes out · participle present marginalizing out · participle past marginalized out · past marginalized out

  1. mathematicsThe act of discarding a subset of random variables from a probability distribution to find the marginal distribution.

    To do this, we need to marginalize out the model parameters #92;mu, W, and #92;sigma² with respect to appropriate prior distributions.

    2006, Cristopher M. Bishop, chapter 12, in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, page 581
    1 more example

    One way to efficiently define such a large set of functions is to learn a probability distribution over all the relevant variables, then solve the classification task by marginalizing out the missing variables.

    2016, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, chapter 5, in Deep Learning, page 98
Cite this entry
APA

marginalize out. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/marginalize%20out

MLA

“marginalize out.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/marginalize%20out. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “marginalize out,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/marginalize%20out.

Source: marginalize out on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.