Related papers: Automatic Variational Inference in Stan
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
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)…
We prove that black-box variational inference (BBVI) with control variates, particularly the sticking-the-landing (STL) estimator, converges at a geometric (traditionally called "linear") rate under perfect variational family specification.…
Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…
Learning a generative model from partial data (data with missingness) is a challenging area of machine learning research. We study a specific implementation of the Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes (AEVB) algorithm, named in this paper as a…
We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, termed variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation…
Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In…
Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…
A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…
This study introduces Variational Automatic Relevance Determination (VARD), a novel approach tailored for fitting sparse additive regression models in high-dimensional settings. VARD distinguishes itself by its ability to independently…
Frequently, population studies feature pyramidally-organized data represented using Hierarchical Bayesian Models (HBM) enriched with plates. These models can become prohibitively large in settings such as neuroimaging, where a sample is…
We formalize the problem of learning interdomain correspondences in the absence of paired data as Bayesian inference in a latent variable model (LVM), where one seeks the underlying hidden representations of entities from one domain as…
Data assimilation refers to a set of algorithms designed to compute the optimal estimate of a system's state by refining the prior prediction (known as background states) using observed data. Variational assimilation methods rely on the…
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…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…
In this article, we propose a variational inference formulation of auto-associative memories, allowing us to combine perceptual inference and memory retrieval into the same mathematical framework. In this formulation, the prior probability…
Accurate calibration of stochastic agent-based models (ABMs) in epidemiology is crucial to make them useful in public health policy decisions and interventions. Traditional calibration methods, e.g., Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), that…
Algorithmic differentiation (AD) has become increasingly capable and straightforward to use. However, AD is inefficient when applied directly to solvers, a feature of most engineering analyses. We can leverage implicit differentiation to…
In this paper, we consider a Bayesian bi-level variable selection problem in high-dimensional regressions. In many practical situations, it is natural to assign group membership to each predictor. Examples include that genetic variants can…