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Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…
The EM training algorithm of the classical i-vector extractor is often incorrectly described as a maximum-likelihood method. The i-vector model is however intractable: the likelihood itself and the hidden-variable posteriors needed for the…
Bayesian variable selection is a powerful tool for data analysis, as it offers a principled method for variable selection that accounts for prior information and uncertainty. However, wider adoption of Bayesian variable selection has been…
Gaussian and discrete non-Gaussian spatial datasets are common across fields like public health, ecology, geosciences, and social sciences. Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are a flexible class of models for…
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…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
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…
Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…
Through the Bayesian lens of data assimilation, uncertainty on model parameters is traditionally quantified through the posterior covariance matrix. However, in modern settings involving high-dimensional and computationally expensive…
Recent variational Bayes methods for geospatial regression, proposed as an alternative to computationally expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, have leveraged Nearest Neighbor Gaussian processes (NNGP) to achieve scalability.…
Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…
Variational inference is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
We propose a robust and scalable framework for variational Bayes (VB) that effectively handles outliers and contamination of arbitrary nature in large datasets. Our approach divides the dataset into disjoint subsets, computes the posterior…
Variational Bayes (VB) inference algorithm is used widely to estimate both the parameters and the unobserved hidden variables in generative statistical models. The algorithm -- inspired by variational methods used in computational physics…
Structural equation models are commonly used to capture the relationship between sets of observed and unobservable variables. Traditionally these models are fitted using frequentist approaches but recently researchers and practitioners have…
Hierarchical parametric models consisting of observable and latent variables are widely used for unsupervised learning tasks. For example, a mixture model is a representative hierarchical model for clustering. From the statistical point of…
An ordinary differential equation (ODE) model, whose regression curves are a set of solution curves for some ODEs, poses a challenge in parameter estimation. The challenge, due to the frequent absence of analytic solutions and the…
We propose a fast and theoretically grounded method for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging in latent variable regression models. Our framework addresses three interrelated challenges: (i) intractable marginal likelihoods, (ii)…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…