Related papers: Optimal Gaussian approximations to the posterior f…
We construct optimal low-rank approximations for the Gaussian posterior distribution in linear Gaussian inverse problems with possibly infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert parameter spaces and finite-dimensional data spaces. We first…
To achieve scalable and accurate inference for latent Gaussian processes, we propose a variational approximation based on a family of Gaussian distributions whose covariance matrices have sparse inverse Cholesky (SIC) factors. We combine…
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…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…
Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…
In Bayesian analysis of multi-way contingency tables, the selection of a prior distribution for either the log-linear parameters or the cell probabilities parameters is a major challenge. In this paper, we define a flexible family of…
Bayesian model comparison requires the specification of a prior distribution on the parameter space of each candidate model. In this connection two concerns arise: on the one hand the elicitation task rapidly becomes prohibitive as the…
Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…
Due to their conjugate posteriors, Gaussian process priors are attractive for estimating the drift of stochastic differential equations with continuous time observations. However, their performance strongly depends on the choice of the…
Bayesian coresets speed up posterior inference in the large-scale data regime by approximating the full-data log-likelihood function with a surrogate log-likelihood based on a small, weighted subset of the data. But while Bayesian coresets…
Graphical Gaussian models with edge and vertex symmetries were introduced by \citet{HojLaur:2008} who also gave an algorithm to compute the maximum likelihood estimate of the precision matrix for such models. In this paper, we take a…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
We consider estimating the predictive density under Kullback-Leibler loss in an $\ell_0$ sparse Gaussian sequence model. Explicit expressions of the first order minimax risk along with its exact constant, asymptotically least favorable…
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…
Scientists continue to develop increasingly complex mechanistic models to reflect their knowledge more realistically. Statistical inference using these models can be challenging since the corresponding likelihood function is often…
We study the approximation of arbitrary distributions $P$ on $d$-dimensional space by distributions with log-concave density. Approximation means minimizing a Kullback--Leibler-type functional. We show that such an approximation exists if…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
This paper concerns the approximation of probability measures on $\mathbf{R}^d$ with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Given an admissible target measure, we show the existence of the best approximation, with respect to this…
We study the rate of Bayesian consistency for hierarchical priors consisting of prior weights on a model index set and a prior on a density model for each choice of model index. Ghosal, Lember and Van der Vaart [2] have obtained general…