Your definition of "variational methods" is actually a definition of generative models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_model https://en.wikipedia.org

Your definition of "variational methods" is actually a definition of generative models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_model. variational methods is a much more specific concept, and your answer speaks more to the general and high-level concept of generative models. Notice on the wikipedia page for generative models, there is a lot more than variational methods.