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Bayesian methods are appealing in their flexibility in modeling complex data and ability in capturing uncertainty in parameters. However, when Bayes' rule does not result in tractable closed-form, most approximate inference algorithms lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-09 Bo Dai , Niao He , Hanjun Dai , Le Song

Discrete normal distributions are defined as the distributions with prescribed means and covariance matrices which maximize entropy on the integer lattice support. The set of discrete normal distributions form an exponential family with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Frank Nielsen

We consider a Bayesian nonparametric approach to a family of linear inverse problems in a separable Hilbert space setting with Gaussian noise. We assume Gaussian priors, which are conjugate to the model, and present a method of identifying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-08-05 Sergios Agapiou , Stig Larsson , Andrew M. Stuart

For ill-posed inverse problems, a regularised solution can be interpreted as a mode of the posterior distribution in a Bayesian framework. This framework enriches the set the solutions, as other posterior estimates can be used as a solution…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-04-22 Natalia Bochkina

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 David M. Blei , Alp Kucukelbir , Jon D. McAuliffe

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

Effective uncertainty quantification is important for training modern predictive models with limited data, enhancing both accuracy and robustness. While Bayesian methods are effective for this purpose, they can be challenging to scale. When…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jasmeet Kaur

PAC-Bayesian set up involves a stochastic classifier characterized by a posterior distribution on a classifier set, offers a high probability bound on its averaged true risk and is robust to the training sample used. For a given posterior,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Puja Sahu , Nandyala Hemachandra

In this paper we consider Bayesian estimation for the parameters of inverse Gaussian distribution. Our emphasis is on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. We provide complete implementation of the Gibbs sampler algorithm. Assuming an…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-10-17 B. N. Pandey , Pulastya Bandyopadhyay

Current methods for learning graphical models with latent variables and a fixed structure estimate optimal values for the model parameters. Whereas this approach usually produces overfitting and suboptimal generalization performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Hagai Attias

A novel approximate Bayesian filter based on backward stochastic differential equations is introduced. It uses a nonlinear Feynman--Kac representation of the filtering problem and the approximation of an unnormalized filtering density using…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Kasper Bågmark , Adam Andersson , Stig Larsson

We quantify the performance of approximations to stochastic filtering by the Kullback-Leibler divergence to the optimal Bayesian filter. Using a two-state Markov process that drives a Brownian measurement process as prototypical test case,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-10-26 Rahul O. Ramakrishnan , Andrea Auconi , Benjamin M. Friedrich

Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Michael Diao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Sinho Chewi , Adil Salim

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

In recent years, methods of approximate parameter estimation have attracted considerable interest in complex problems where exact likelihoods are hard to obtain. In their most basic form, Bayesian methods such as Approximate Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2015-07-17 Johanna Bertl , Gregory Ewing , Carolin Kosiol , Andreas Futschik

We consider a prior for nonparametric Bayesian estimation which uses finite random series with a random number of terms. The prior is constructed through distributions on the number of basis functions and the associated coefficients. We…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-02-10 Weining Shen , Subhashis Ghosal

Bayesian neural networks often approximate the weight-posterior with a Gaussian distribution. However, practical posteriors are often, even locally, highly non-Gaussian, and empirical performance deteriorates. We propose a simple parametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Federico Bergamin , Pablo Moreno-Muñoz , Søren Hauberg , Georgios Arvanitidis

Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-22 Hachem Saddiki , Andrew C. Trapp , Patrick Flaherty

We consider heteroscedastic nonparametric regression models, when both the mean function and variance function are unknown and to be estimated with nonparametric approaches. We derive convergence rates of posterior distributions for this…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-10-07 Yuao Hu

Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2007-12-11 Heng Lian