English

Amortized Vine Copulas for High-Dimensional Density and Information Estimation

Machine Learning 2026-05-08 v2 Information Theory math.IT Methodology

Abstract

Modeling high-dimensional dependencies while keeping likelihoods tractable remains challenging. Classical vine-copula pipelines are interpretable but can be expensive, while many neural estimators are flexible but less structured. In this work, we propose Vine Denoising Copula (VDC), an amortized vine-copula pipeline for continuous-data, simplified-vine dependence modeling. VDC trains a single bivariate denoising model and reuses it across all vine edges. For each edge, given pseudo-observations, the model predicts a piecewise-constant density grid. We then apply an IPFP/Sinkhorn projection that normalizes mass and drives the marginals to uniformity. This preserves the tractable vine-likelihood structure and the usual copula interpretation while replacing repeated per-edge optimization with GPU inference. Across synthetic and real-data benchmarks, VDC delivers strong bivariate density accuracy, competitive MI/TC estimation, and faster high-dimensional vine fitting. These gains make explicit information estimation and dependence decomposition feasible when repeated vine fitting would otherwise be costly, while conditional downstream tasks remain a limitation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.20568,
  title  = {Amortized Vine Copulas for High-Dimensional Density and Information Estimation},
  author = {Houman Safaai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20568},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:30:26.793Z