Related papers: A trust-region method for stochastic variational i…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…
Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…
There is emerging evidence that trust-region (TR) algorithms are very effective at solving derivative-free nonconvex stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a Monte Carlo (MC) estimate. A recent strand of…
We present a variational method for online state estimation and parameter learning in state-space models (SSMs), a ubiquitous class of latent variable models for sequential data. As per standard batch variational techniques, we use…
Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed…
Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these…
We introduce two multifidelity trust-region methods based on the Magical Trust Region (MTR) framework. MTR augments the classical trust-region step with a secondary, informative direction. In our approaches, the secondary ``magical''…
In this work, we consider solving optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming method to find both first- and second-order stationary…
This paper examines Bayesian belief network inference using simulation as a method for computing the posterior probabilities of network variables. Specifically, it examines the use of a method described by Henrion, called logic sampling,…
Bayes' rule naturally allows for inference refinement in a streaming fashion, without the need to recompute posteriors from scratch whenever new data arrives. In principle, Bayesian streaming is straightforward: we update our prior with the…
We develop a trust-region method for efficiently minimizing the sum of a smooth function, a nonsmooth convex function, and the composition of a finite-valued support function with a smooth function. Optimization problems with this structure…
We propose a trust-region method for finite-sum minimization with an adaptive sample size adjustment technique, which is practical in the sense that it leads to a globally convergent method that shows strong performance empirically without…
Gaussian processes offer a flexible kernel method for regression. While Gaussian processes have many useful theoretical properties and have proven practically useful, they suffer from poor scaling in the number of observations. In…
Meta-analyses of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) studies have been gathering attention in research in clinical epidemiology and health technology development, and bivariate random-effects model is becoming a standard tool. However, standard…
This paper introduces a local optimization-based approach to test statistical hypotheses and to construct confidence intervals. This approach can be viewed as an extension of bootstrap, and yields asymptotically valid tests and confidence…
Parameter inference is a fundamental problem in data-driven modeling. Given observed data that is believed to be a realization of some parameterized model, the aim is to find parameter values that are able to explain the observed data. In…
The trust-region (TR) method is renowned historically for its robustness in nonconvex problems and extraordinary numerical performance, but the study of its performance in convex optimization is somehow limited. This paper complements the…
The analysis of data from multiple experiments, such as observations of several individuals, is commonly approached using mixed-effects models, which account for variation between individuals through hierarchical representations. This makes…
Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…
Structured variational inference constitutes a core methodology in modern statistical applications. Unlike mean-field variational inference, the approximate posterior is assumed to have interdependent structure. We consider the natural…