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This paper investigates the approximation of Gaussian random variables in Banach spaces, focusing on the high-probability bounds for the approximation of Gaussian random variables using finitely many observations. We derive non-asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-28 Daniel Winkle , Ingo Steinwart , Bernard Haasdonk

We study a class of Markov chains that model the evolution of a quantum system subject to repeated measurements. Each Markov chain in this class is defined by a measure on the space of matrices. It is then given by a random product of…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-04-03 Tristan Benoist , Martin Fraas , Yan Pautrat , Clément Pellegrini

Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Charles C. Margossian , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Lawrence K. Saul

An initial screening experiment may lead to ambiguous conclusions regarding the factors which are active in explaining the variation of an outcome variable: thus adding follow-up runs becomes necessary. We propose a fully Bayes objective…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-05-13 Guido Consonni , Laura Deldossi

In machine learning, it is common to optimize the parameters of a probabilistic model, modulated by an ad hoc regularization term that penalizes some values of the parameters. Regularization terms appear naturally in Variational Inference,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Pierre Wolinski , Guillaume Charpiat , Yann Ollivier

We give an equivalence-singularity criterion for infinite products of Cauchy measures under simultaneous shifts of the location and scale parameters. Our result is an extension of Lie and Sullivan's result giving an equivalence-singularity…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-01-21 Kazuki Okamura

In this work, we investigate Gaussian Mixture Models ({\it abbrv} GMM) and the related problem of non parametric maximum likelihood estimation ({\it abbrv} NPMLE) from the perspective of statistical mechanics. In particular, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-25 Subhroshekhar Ghosh , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Satyaki Mukherjee , Hoang-Son Tran

General relativity has a Hamiltonian formulation, which formally provides a canonical (Liouville) measure on the space of solutions. In ordinary statistical physics, the Liouville measure is used to compute probabilities of macrostates, and…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2012-08-16 Joshua S. Schiffrin , Robert M. Wald

Density-based directed distances -- particularly known as divergences -- between probability distributions are widely used in statistics as well as in the adjacent research fields of information theory, artificial intelligence and machine…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-03 Michel Broniatowski , Wolfgang Stummer

We examine a family of intrinsic performance measures in terms of probability distributions that generalize Hellinger distance and Fisher information. They are applied to quantum metrology to assess the uncertainty in the detection of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-03-20 Alfredo Luis , Alfonso Rodil

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental concept in information theory that quantifies the discrepancy between two probability distributions. In the context of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), it serves as a central regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Andrés Muñoz , Rodrigo Ramele

Projection Pursuit methodology permits to solve the difficult problem of finding an estimate of a density defined on a set of very large dimension. In his seminal article, Huber (see "Projection pursuit", Annals of Statistics, 1985)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-08-18 Jacques Touboul

We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…

Computation · Statistics 2014-01-10 Tim Salimans

This paper proposes a new family of lower and upper bounds on the minimum mean squared error (MMSE). The key idea is to minimize/maximize the MMSE subject to the constraint that the joint distribution of the input-output statistics lies in…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Michael Fauß , Alex Dysto , H. Vincent Poor

We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Jaouad Mourtada

Black box variational inference (BBVI) with reparameterization gradients triggered the exploration of divergence measures other than the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, such as alpha divergences. In this paper, we view BBVI with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-09 Robert Bamler , Cheng Zhang , Manfred Opper , Stephan Mandt

We construct surface measures in a Hilbert space endowed with a probability measure $\nu$. The theory fits for invariant measures of some stochastic partial differential equations such as Burgers and reaction--diffusion equations. Other…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-08-23 Giuseppe Da Prato , Alessandra Lunardi , Luciano Tubaro

This paper deals with three major types of convergence of probability measures on metric spaces: weak convergence, setwise converges, and convergence in the total variation. First, it describes and compares necessary and sufficient…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-07-04 Eugene A. Feinberg , Pavlo O. Kasyanov , Michael Z. Zgurovsky

We consider the problem of sampling from a probability distribution $\pi$. It is well known that this can be written as an optimisation problem over the space of probability distribution in which we aim to minimise the Kullback--Leibler…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-11 Francesca R. Crucinio , Sahani Pathiraja

This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Jean-Baptiste Regli , Ricardo Silva