Expand conditional by marginalisation and drop terms from conditional I have come across this conditional expansion a few times, and I can't seem to make sense of it.
$$p(z|y) = \int{p(z|f)p(f|y)df}$$
I would go about it like this:
\begin{align}
\require{cancel}
p(z|y) & = \frac{p(z,y)}{p(y)} \\
& = \frac{\int{p(z,f,y)df}}{p(y)} \\
& = \frac{\int{\cancel{p(y)}p(f|y)p(z|f,y)df}}{\cancel{p(y)}} \\
& = \int{p(z|f,\color{red}{y})p(f|y)df} \neq \int{p(z|f)p(f|y)df}
\end{align}
How is it that during the expansion we can drop the conditional on y from $p(z|f,y)$? I've seen it in a lot of papers on variational inference, and it's on the wikipedia page for Bayesian Inference: $\hspace{1em} p(\tilde{x}|X,\alpha) = \int{p(\tilde{x}|\theta)p(\theta|X,\alpha)d\theta}.\hspace{1em}$ Why isn't the first item in the integral $p(\tilde{x}|X,\alpha,\theta)$? I feel like I am missing some fundamental thing about conditioning which allows shuffling the conditionals around like this.
Similar to this question, the conditioned on variable is present in all subsequent factors, why doesn't that happen in the above cases?

Yes, it is confusing. However, there is some logic behind it.
Since $z$ and $y$ are data, conditional upon $f$, $z$ and $y$ are assumed independent - in which case, $p(z|f,y)=p(z|f)$. To make a concrete example, if you know that $z$ and $y$ are both distributed according to $f = \mathrm{Negative\ Binomial}(3, 0.7)$, $y$ contains no information about $z$ that you don't already have from knowing the distribution $f$; therefore, $p(z|f,y) = p(z|f)$.
As to whether you can achieve this happy ideal in practice - you don't want to build models $f$ such that there is still information in the observed data $y$ that is useful for helping to predict $z$ even knowing $f$, writing a little loosely, so we assume you don't.
