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Related papers: Variational Bayes with Intractable Likelihood

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Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Giri Gopalan

We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

The digital telecommunications receiver is an important context for inference methodology, the key objective being to minimize the expected loss function in recovering the transmitted information. For that criterion, the optimal decision is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Viet Hung Tran

Bayesian statistics is concerned with conducting posterior inference for the unknown quantities in a given statistical model. Conventional Bayesian inference requires the specification of a probabilistic model for the observed data, and the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-05-11 David T. Frazier , Christopher Drovandi , David J. Nott

We present a scalable approach to performing approximate fully Bayesian inference in generic state space models. The proposed method is an alternative to particle MCMC that provides fully Bayesian inference of both the dynamic latent states…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-13 Marcel Hirt , Petros Dellaportas

Many models of interest in the natural and social sciences have no closed-form likelihood function, which means that they cannot be treated using the usual techniques of statistical inference. In the case where such models can be…

Computation · Statistics 2012-07-19 Simon Barthelmé , Nicolas Chopin

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

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund

Variational Bayesian inference and (collapsed) Gibbs sampling are the two important classes of inference algorithms for Bayesian networks. Both have their advantages and disadvantages: collapsed Gibbs sampling is unbiased but is also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Max Welling , Yee Whye Teh , Hilbert Kappen

A new empirical Bayes approach to variable selection in the context of generalized linear models is developed. The proposed algorithm scales to situations in which the number of putative explanatory variables is very large, possibly much…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-06-29 Haim Bar , James Booth , Martin T. Wells

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a useful class of methods for Bayesian inference when the likelihood function is computationally intractable. In practice, the basic ABC algorithm may be inefficient in the presence of discrepancy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-05-14 Stefano Cabras , Maria Eugenia Castellanos Nueda , Erlis Ruli

Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-04 Pedro Regueiro , Abel Rodríguez , Juan Sosa

For a Bayesian, real-time forecasting with the posterior predictive distribution can be challenging for a variety of time series models. First, estimating the parameters of a time series model can be difficult with sample-based approaches…

Applications · Statistics 2022-08-08 Taylor R. Brown

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

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-29 Alexander Moreno , Tameem Adel , Edward Meeds , James M. Rehg , Max Welling

Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

The Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) method is one of the most computationally efficient techniques for Bayesian inference. However, its use has been restricted to models with conjugate priors or those that require analytical…

Computation · Statistics 2023-05-18 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Paco Tseng , Robert Kohn

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) procedure for high-dimensional linear model inferences with heavy tail shrinkage priors, such as student-t prior. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of the proposed VB method and prove that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Jincheng Bai , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian parameter inference in non-linear state-space models with intractable likelihoods. Sequential Monte Carlo with approximate Bayesian computations (SMC-ABC) is one approach to approximate the…

Computation · Statistics 2017-06-14 Johan Dahlin , Mattias Villani , Thomas B. Schön