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Bayesian inference has theoretical attractions as a principled framework for reasoning about beliefs. However, the motivations of Bayesian inference which claim it to be the only 'rational' kind of reasoning do not apply in practice. They…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-14 Sebastian Farquhar

The robustness to the prior of Bayesian inference procedures based on a measure of statistical evidence are considered. These inferences are shown to have optimal properties with respect to robustness. Furthermore, a connection between…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-04-28 Luai Al-Labadi , Michael Evans

Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Andrew Wood , Moshik Hershcovitch , Daniel Waddington , Sarel Cohen , Peter Chin

Robust Bayesian analysis has been mainly devoted to detecting and measuring robustness w.r.t. the prior distribution. Many contributions in the literature aim to define suitable classes of priors which allow the computation of variations of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Antonio Di Noia , Fabrizio Ruggeri , Antonietta Mira

Likelihood-free Bayesian inference algorithms are popular methods for calibrating the parameters of complex, stochastic models, required when the likelihood of the observed data is intractable. These algorithms characteristically rely…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-23 Thomas P Prescott , David J Warne , Ruth E Baker

In statistical applications, it is common to encounter parameters supported on a varying or unknown dimensional space. Examples include the fused lasso regression, the matrix recovery under an unknown low rank, etc. Despite the ease of…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-04 Maoran Xu , Hua Zhou , Yujie Hu , Leo L. Duan

Bayesian probabilistic numerical methods are a set of tools providing posterior distributions on the output of numerical methods. The use of these methods is usually motivated by the fact that they can represent our uncertainty due to…

Computation · Statistics 2018-08-01 Xiaoyue Xi , François-Xavier Briol , Mark Girolami

Robustness of decision rules to shifts in the data-generating process is crucial to the successful deployment of decision-making systems. Such shifts can be viewed as interventions on a causal graph, which capture (possibly hypothetical)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Benjie Wang , Clare Lyle , Marta Kwiatkowska

This paper develops a methodology for robust Bayesian inference through the use of disparities. Metrics such as Hellinger distance and negative exponential disparity have a long history in robust estimation in frequentist inference. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-11-28 Giles Hooker , Anand Vidyashankar

Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

Implementing Bayesian inference is often computationally challenging in applications involving complex models, and sometimes calculating the likelihood itself is difficult. Synthetic likelihood is one approach for carrying out inference…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-15 David T. Frazier , David J. Nott , Christopher Drovandi , Robert Kohn

In many instances, the application of approximate Bayesian methods is hampered by two practical features: 1) the requirement to project the data down to low-dimensional summary, including the choice of this projection, which ultimately…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-26 David T. Frazier

Bayesian optimization is a coherent, ubiquitous approach to decision-making under uncertainty, with applications including multi-arm bandits, active learning, and black-box optimization. Bayesian optimization selects decisions (i.e.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Samuel Stanton , Wesley Maddox , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Bayesian model comparison is often based on the posterior distribution over the set of compared models. This distribution is often observed to concentrate on a single model even when other measures of model fit or forecasting ability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-10 Oscar Oelrich , Shutong Ding , Måns Magnusson , Aki Vehtari , Mattias Villani

Bayesian statistics has gained popularity in psychological research due to its intuitive uncertainty quantification and convenient information-updating rules. In many applications, however, prior distributions are introduced merely as…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Yang Liu , Jonathan P. Williams , Jan Hannig

We explore the notion of uncertainty in the context of modern abstractive summarization models, using the tools of Bayesian Deep Learning. Our approach approximates Bayesian inference by first extending state-of-the-art summarization models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Alexios Gidiotis , Grigorios Tsoumakas

A common concern with Bayesian methodology in scientific contexts is that inferences can be heavily influenced by subjective biases. As presented here, there are two types of bias for some quantity of interest: bias against and bias in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-03-06 Michael Evans , Yang Guo

In Bayesian analysis, the posterior follows from the data and a choice of a prior and a likelihood. One hopes that the posterior is robust to reasonable variation in the choice of prior, since this choice is made by the modeler and is often…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-12-07 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick , Michael Jordan

We target the problem of accuracy and robustness in causal inference from finite data sets. Some state-of-the-art algorithms produce clear output complete with solid theoretical guarantees but are susceptible to propagating erroneous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Tom Claassen , Tom Heskes

When collaborating with an AI system, we need to assess when to trust its recommendations. If we mistakenly trust it in regions where it is likely to err, catastrophic failures may occur, hence the need for Bayesian approaches for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Federico Cerutti , Lance M. Kaplan , Angelika Kimmig , Murat Sensoy