What is the difference between Markov chain approximation and variational approximation?

PageRank and RBMs are not Markov chain approximations, rather they use Markov chains in their implementation. Similarly, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is a generative probabilistic model (aka Bayesian hierarchical model) and not a variational approximation. LDA may use variational approximation methods for inference. Let me take the LDA model as an example. In LDA, a complicated generative model is constructed to learn the topic allocation probabilities of different documents.