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Bayesian inference is often implemented using approximations, which can yield interval estimates that are too narrow, not fully capturing the uncertainty in the posterior distribution. We address the question of how to adjust these…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-23 Tiffany Cai , Philip Greengard , Ben Goodrich , Andrew Gelman

Laplace approximations are a standard tool for computationally efficient inference in latent Gaussian models, but they fail for quantile regression with the asymmetric Laplace likelihood because the observed Hessian vanishes almost…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Andrea Nava , Fabio Sigrist

We propose a method to approximate the distribution of robot configurations satisfying multiple objectives. Our approach uses variational inference, a popular method in Bayesian computation, which has several advantages over sampling-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Emmanuel Pignat , Teguh Lembono , Sylvain Calinon

Many statistical models can be simulated forwards but have intractable likelihoods. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to infer properties of these models from data. Traditionally these methods approximate the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-03 George Papamakarios , Iain Murray

The predictive Bayesian view involves eliciting a sequence of one-step-ahead predictive distributions in lieu of specifying a likelihood function and prior distribution. Recent methods have leveraged predictive distributions which are…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-25 Yiu Yin Yung , Stephen M. S. Lee , Edwin Fong

We study the use of Gaussian process emulators to approximate the parameter-to-observation map or the negative log-likelihood in Bayesian inverse problems. We prove error bounds on the Hellinger distance between the true posterior…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Andrew M. Stuart , Aretha L. Teckentrup

There are several challenges associated with inverse problems in which we seek to reconstruct a piecewise constant field, and which we model using multiple level sets. Adopting a Bayesian viewpoint, we impose prior distributions on both the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-01 William Reese , Arvind K. Saibaba , Jonghyun Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-15 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Reza Babanezhad , Wu Lin , Mark Schmidt , Masashi Sugiyama

We present Bayesian techniques for solving inverse problems which involve mean-square convergent random approximations of the forward map. Noisy approximations of the forward map arise in several fields, such as multiscale problems and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-11-08 Giacomo Garegnani

Computer vision tasks are difficult because of the large variability in the data that is induced by changes in light, background, partial occlusion as well as the varying pose, texture, and shape of objects. Generative approaches to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Adam Kortylewski , Mario Wieser , Andreas Morel-Forster , Aleksander Wieczorek , Sonali Parbhoo , Volker Roth , Thomas Vetter

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-18 Christopher Nemeth , Chris Sherlock

Bayesian inference for complex models with an intractable likelihood can be tackled using algorithms performing many calls to computer simulators. These approaches are collectively known as "simulation-based inference" (SBI). Recent SBI…

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

Modern generative models can produce realistic samples, however, balancing memorisation and generalisation remains an open problem. We approach this challenge from a Bayesian perspective by focusing on the parameter space of flow matching…

The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-02-14 Simon Arridge , Kazufumi Ito , Bangti Jin , Chen Zhang

In a non supervised Bayesian estimation approach for inverse problems in imaging systems, one tries to estimate jointly the unknown image pixels $f$ and the hyperparameters $\theta$ given the observed data $g$ and a model $M$ linking these…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2009-04-28 Ali Mohammad-Djafari

Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yufei Cui , Wuguannan Yao , Qiao Li , Antoni B. Chan , Chun Jason Xue

The main object of Bayesian statistical inference is the determination of posterior distributions. Sometimes these laws are given for quantities devoid of empirical value. This serious drawback vanishes when one confines oneself to…

Statistical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2008-12-02 Federico Bassetti

Bayesian inference typically relies on specifying a parametric model that approximates the data-generating process. However, misspecified models can yield poor convergence rates and unreliable posterior calibration. Bayesian empirical…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-27 Kenyon Ng , Weichang Yu , Howard D. Bondell