Related papers: Black Box Variational Inference
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…
Models with a large number of latent variables are often used to fully utilize the information in big or complex data. However, they can be difficult to estimate using standard approaches, and variational inference methods are a popular…
Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…
Latent force models are systems whereby there is a mechanistic model describing the dynamics of the system state, with some unknown forcing term that is approximated with a Gaussian process. If such dynamics are non-linear, it can be…
We present a generative modeling approach based on the variational inference framework for likelihood-free simulation-based inference. The method leverages latent variables within variational autoencoders to efficiently estimate complex…
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…
Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…
Gradient-based optimization is the foundation of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Even when the mechanism being optimized is unknown or not differentiable, optimization using high-variance or biased gradient estimates is still…
A broad class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms known as "variational algorithms" have been proposed in the context of quantum simulation, machine learning, and combinatorial optimization as a means of potentially achieving a quantum…
How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
We describe a variational approximation method for efficient inference in large-scale probabilistic models. Variational methods are deterministic procedures that provide approximations to marginal and conditional probabilities of interest.…
Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…
Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…
A common problem, arising in many different applied contexts, consists in estimating the number of exponentially damped sinusoids whose weighted sum best fits a finite set of noisy data and in estimating their parameters. Many different…
Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and…
We develop an automated variational method for inference in models with Gaussian process (GP) priors and general likelihoods. The method supports multiple outputs and multiple latent functions and does not require detailed knowledge of the…
Estimating hidden processes from non-linear noisy observations is particularly difficult when the parameters of these processes are not known. This paper adopts a machine learning approach to devise variational Bayesian inference for such…