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Related papers: Diagnostics for Variational Bayes approximations

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Current literature on posterior approximation for Bayesian inference offers many alternative methods. Does our chosen approximation scheme work well on the observed data? The best existing generic diagnostic tools treating this kind of…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-22 Hanwen Xing , Geoff K. Nicholls , Jeong Eun Lee

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-07 Kolyan Ray , Botond Szabo , Gabriel Clara

Approximate inference methods like the Laplace method, Laplace approximations and variational methods, amongst others, are popular methods when exact inference is not feasible due to the complexity of the model or the abundance of data. In…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-02 Janet van Niekerk , Haavard Rue

Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-27 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick

This paper establishes the asymptotic consistency of the {\it loss-calibrated variational Bayes} (LCVB) method. LCVB was proposed in~\cite{LaSiGh2011} as a method for approximately computing Bayesian posteriors in a `loss aware' manner.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-05 Prateek Jaiswal , Harsha Honnappa , Vinayak A. Rao

The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-02 Sefan Hörtling , Daniel Dold , Oliver Dürr , Beate Sick

The spatial error model (SEM) is a type of simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model for analysing spatially correlated data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most widely used Bayesian methods for estimating SEM, but it has…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-14 Anjana Wijayawardhana , David Gunawan , Thomas Suesse

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-19 David Gunawan , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Robert Kohn

Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-12 Nikolaos Gianniotis , Christoph Schnörr , Christian Molkenthin , Sanjay Singh Bora

Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Sébastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

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 provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

The PAC-Bayesian approach is a powerful set of techniques to derive non- asymptotic risk bounds for random estimators. The corresponding optimal distribution of estimators, usually called the Gibbs posterior, is unfortunately intractable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-16 Pierre Alquier , James Ridgway , Nicolas Chopin

Estimation and prediction in high dimensional multivariate factor stochastic volatility models is an important and active research area because such models allow a parsimonious representation of multivariate stochastic volatility. Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2021-04-27 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

Variational Bayes (VB), also known as independent mean-field approximation, has become a popular method for Bayesian network inference in recent years. Its application is vast, e.g. in neural network, compressed sensing, clustering, etc. to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Viet Hung Tran

Variational approximation methods have proven to be useful for scaling Bayesian computations to large data sets and highly parametrized models. Applying variational methods involves solving an optimization problem, and recent research in…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-01-13 Victor M. -H. Ong , David J. Nott , Michael S. Smith

Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-20 Shrijita Bhattacharya , Zihuan Liu , Tapabrata Maiti

Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Oliver Dürr , Stephan Hörling , Daniel Dold , Ivonne Kovylov , Beate Sick