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Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

In this paper, we study porous media flows in heterogeneous stochastic media. We propose an efficient forward simulation technique that is tailored for variational Bayesian inversion. As a starting point, the proposed forward simulation…

Applications · Statistics 2018-02-12 Keren Yang , Nilabja Guha , Yalchin Efendiev , Bani K. Mallick

Structural equation models (SEMs) are commonly used to study the structural relationship between observed variables and latent constructs. Recently, Bayesian fitting procedures for SEMs have received more attention thanks to their potential…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-12 Khue-Dung Dang , Luca Maestrini , Francis K. C. Hui

The biased net paradigm was the first general and empirically tractable scheme for parameterizing complex patterns of dependence in networks, expressing deviations from uniform random graph structure in terms of latent ``bias events,''…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-30 Carter T. Butts

Hawkes processes are often applied to model dependence and interaction phenomena in multivariate event data sets, such as neuronal spike trains, social interactions, and financial transactions. In the nonparametric setting, learning the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-04 Deborah Sulem , Vincent Rivoirard , Judith Rousseau

We present a scalable approach to performing approximate fully Bayesian inference in generic state space models. The proposed method is an alternative to particle MCMC that provides fully Bayesian inference of both the dynamic latent states…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-13 Marcel Hirt , Petros Dellaportas

Non-linear hierarchical models are commonly used in many disciplines. However, inference in the presence of non-nested effects and on large datasets is challenging and computationally burdensome. This paper provides two contributions to…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-22 Max Goplerud

Bayesian networks (BNs) are probabilistic graphical models for describing complex joint probability distributions. The main problem for BNs is inference: Determine the probability of an event given observed evidence. Since exact inference…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Kevin Batz , Benjamin Lucien Kaminski , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Christoph Matheja

Sequential Bayesian inference over predictive functions is a natural framework for continual learning from streams of data. However, applying it to neural networks has proved challenging in practice. Addressing the drawbacks of existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Freddie Bickford Smith , Qixuan Feng , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal

We develop a mean-field theory for large, non-exchangeable particle (agent) systems where the states and interaction weights co-evolve in a coupled system of SDEs. A first main result is the establishment of the propagation of…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Datong Zhou

Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-23 Yusheng Xie , Nan Du , Wei Fan , Jing Zhai , Weicheng Zhu

Markov random fields are common prior distributions used in Bayesian inverse imaging problems. In particular, difference priors assign probability distributions to differences between neighbouring pixels, such as Gaussian, Laplace, or…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-19 Jasper Marijn Everink

We propose a novel method for approximate inference in Bayesian networks (BNs). The idea is to sample data from a BN, learn a latent tree model (LTM) from the data offline, and when online, make inference with the LTM instead of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Yi Wang , Nevin L. Zhang , Tao Chen

Recent advances in neural variational inference have spawned a renaissance in deep latent variable models. In this paper we introduce a generic variational inference framework for generative and conditional models of text. While traditional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-06-07 Yishu Miao , Lei Yu , Phil Blunsom

We perform scalable approximate inference in continuous-depth Bayesian neural networks. In this model class, uncertainty about separate weights in each layer gives hidden units that follow a stochastic differential equation. We demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-01 Winnie Xu , Ricky T. Q. Chen , Xuechen Li , David Duvenaud

Variational autoencoders (VAE) often use Gaussian or category distribution to model the inference process. This puts a limit on variational learning because this simplified assumption does not match the true posterior distribution, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Ke Sun , Xiangliang Zhang

A fundamental question in systems biology is what combinations of mean and variance of the species present in a stochastic biochemical reaction network are attainable by perturbing the system with an external signal. To address this…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-05-02 Francesca Parise , Maria Elena Valcher , John Lygeros

Mean field approximation is a powerful technique which has been used in many settings to study large-scale stochastic systems. In the case of two-timescale systems, the approximation is obtained by a combination of scaling arguments and the…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-01-24 Sebastian Allmeier , Nicolas Gast

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

In conducting non-linear dimensionality reduction and feature learning, it is common to suppose that the data lie near a lower-dimensional manifold. A class of model-based approaches for such problems includes latent variables in an unknown…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-20 Deborshee Sen , Theodore Papamarkou , David Dunson