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Multivariate spatial fields are of interest in many applications, including climate model emulation. Not only can the marginal spatial fields be subject to nonstationarity, but the dependence structure among the marginal fields and between…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-21 Paul F. V. Wiemann , Matthias Katzfuss

This article explores the optimization of variational approximations for posterior covariances of Gaussian multiway arrays. To achieve this, we establish a natural differential geometric optimization framework on the space using the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-10 Quinn Simonis , Martin T. Wells

Empirical Bayes methods are widely used for large-scale inference, yet most classical approaches assume homoscedastic observations and focus primarily on posterior mean estimation. We develop a nonparametric empirical Bayes framework for…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-24 Zhigen Zhao , Shonosuke Sugaasawa

Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are a popular class of Bayesian hierarchical models that include Gaussian processes, as well as certain spatial models and mixed-effect models. Efficient Bayesian inference of LGMs often requires marginalizing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-21 Jinlin Lai , Charles C. Margossian , Daniel R. Sheldon

Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-06 Nan Feng , Xun Huan

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

Bayesian inference typically requires the computation of an approximation to the posterior distribution. An important requirement for an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm is to output high-accuracy posterior mean and uncertainty…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Trevor Campbell , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Tamara Broderick

Each training step for a variational autoencoder (VAE) requires us to sample from the approximate posterior, so we usually choose simple (e.g. factorised) approximate posteriors in which sampling is an efficient computation that fully…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-29 Laurence Aitchison , Vincent Adam , Srinivas C. Turaga

Latent force models are a class of hybrid models for dynamic systems, combining simple mechanistic models with flexible Gaussian process (GP) perturbations. An extension of this framework to include multiplicative interactions between the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-01 Daniel J. Tait , Bruce J. Worton

We consider a latent space model for dynamic networks, where our objective is to estimate the pairwise inner products plus the intercept of the latent positions. To balance posterior inference and computational scalability, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Peng Zhao , Anirban Bhattacharya , Debdeep Pati , Bani K. Mallick

Hierarchical models with gamma hyperpriors provide a flexible, sparse-promoting framework to bridge $L^1$ and $L^2$ regularizations in Bayesian formulations to inverse problems. Despite the Bayesian motivation for these models, existing…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-30 Shiv Agrawal , Hwanwoo Kim , Daniel Sanz-Alonso , Alexander Strang

Multiple imputation has become one of the standard methods in drawing inferences in many incomplete data applications. Applications of multiple imputation in relatively more complex settings, such as high-dimensional clustered data, require…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-08 Qiushuang Li , Recai Yucel

The Tweedie Compound Poisson-Gamma model is routinely used for modeling non-negative continuous data with a discrete probability mass at zero. Mixed models with random effects account for the covariance structure related to the grouping…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-05 Yaodong Yang , Rui Luo , Yuanyuan Liu

There is a growing interest in the so-called Bayesian Predictive Inference approach, which allows to perform Bayesian inference without specifying the likelihood and prior of the model, or the need of any MCMC. Instead, only a sequence of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Marco Battiston , Lorenzo Cappello

The nonlinear conjugate gradient methods are known to be an effective approach for standard unconstrained optimization problems especially for large-scale problems. This paper proposes a proximal nonlinear conjugate gradient method, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Shodai Hamana , Yasushi Narushima

Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-22 Xuezhen Li , Can M. Le

A method for sequential inference of the fixed parameters of a dynamic latent Gaussian models is proposed and evaluated that is based on the iterated Laplace approximation. The method provides a useful trade-off between computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-29 Tiep Mai , Simon Wilson

Inference methods are often formulated as variational approximations: these approximations allow easy evaluation of statistics by marginalization or linear response, but these estimates can be inconsistent. We show that by introducing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-27 Jack Raymond , Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

Inference for GP models with non-Gaussian noises is computationally expensive when dealing with large datasets. Many recent inference methods approximate the posterior distribution with a simpler distribution defined on a small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Linfeng Liu , Liping Liu