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Gaussian variational approximations are widely used for summarizing posterior distributions in Bayesian models, especially in high-dimensional settings. However, a drawback of such approximations is the inability to capture skewness or more…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Lucas Kock , Linda S. L. Tan , Prateek Bansal , David J. Nott

Approximate Bayesian Computation is a family of likelihood-free inference techniques that are well-suited to models defined in terms of a stochastic generating mechanism. In a nutshell, Approximate Bayesian Computation proceeds by computing…

Computation · Statistics 2010-07-28 Michael Blum

Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Bingxin Zhou , Junbin Gao , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Richard Gerlach

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

We quantify the performance of approximations to stochastic filtering by the Kullback-Leibler divergence to the optimal Bayesian filter. Using a two-state Markov process that drives a Brownian measurement process as prototypical test case,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-10-26 Rahul O. Ramakrishnan , Andrea Auconi , Benjamin M. Friedrich

We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-04-24 Matt Hoffman , David M. Blei , Chong Wang , John Paisley

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

In the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, data are often informative, relative to the prior, only on a low-dimensional subspace of the parameter space. Significant computational savings can be achieved by using this subspace to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Alessio Spantini , Antti Solonen , Tiangang Cui , James Martin , Luis Tenorio , Youssef Marzouk

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

Improving efficiency of importance sampler is at the center of research in Monte Carlo methods. While adaptive approach is usually difficult within the Markov Chain Monte Carlo framework, the counterpart in importance sampling can be…

Methodology · Statistics 2007-12-11 Heng Lian

The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Viet Anh Nguyen , Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh , Man-Chung Yue , Daniel Kuhn , Wolfram Wiesemann

In Bayesian theory, calculating a posterior probability distribution is highly important but usually difficult. Therefore, some methods have been put forward to deal with such problem, among which, the most popular one is the asymptotic…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-07-20 Zai-Ying Zhou

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Modern data analysis often involves massive datasets with hundreds of thousands of observations, making traditional inference algorithms computationally prohibitive. Coresets are selection methods designed to choose a smaller subset of…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-13 Bernardo Flores

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

Bayesian neural networks often approximate the weight-posterior with a Gaussian distribution. However, practical posteriors are often, even locally, highly non-Gaussian, and empirical performance deteriorates. We propose a simple parametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Federico Bergamin , Pablo Moreno-Muñoz , Søren Hauberg , Georgios Arvanitidis

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

The Bayesian smoothing equations are generally intractable for systems described by nonlinear stochastic differential equations and discrete-time measurements. Gaussian approximations are a computationally efficient way to approximate the…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2016-04-05 Juha Ala-Luhtala , Simo Särkkä , Robert Piché

We introduce ensembles of stochastic neural networks to approximate the Bayesian posterior, combining stochastic methods such as dropout with deep ensembles. The stochastic ensembles are formulated as families of distributions and trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Oleksandr Balabanov , Bernhard Mehlig , Hampus Linander

We develop a novel method for carrying out model selection for Bayesian autoencoders (BAEs) by means of prior hyper-parameter optimization. Inspired by the common practice of type-II maximum likelihood optimization and its equivalence to…