English
Related papers

Related papers: Automatic Variational ABC

200 papers

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

Complicated generative models often result in a situation where computing the likelihood of observed data is intractable, while simulating from the conditional density given a parameter value is relatively easy. Approximate Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-29 Mijung Park , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Dino Sejdinovic

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

We are living in the big data era, as current technologies and networks allow for the easy and routine collection of data sets in different disciplines. Bayesian Statistics offers a flexible modeling approach which is attractive for…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-05-09 George Karabatsos , Fabrizio Leisen

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has become an essential tool for the analysis of complex stochastic models when the likelihood function is numerically unavailable. However, the well-established statistical method of empirical…

Computation · Statistics 2015-06-05 K. L. Mengersen , P. Pudlo , C. P. Robert

This paper introduces a simple, general framework for likelihood-free Bayesian reinforcement learning, through Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC). The main advantage is that we only require a prior distribution on a class of simulators…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-01 Christos Dimitrakakis , Nikolaos Tziortziotis

Sequential algorithms such as sequential importance sampling (SIS) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) have proven fundamental in Bayesian inference for models not admitting a readily available likelihood function. For approximate Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2024-11-08 Umberto Picchini , Massimiliano Tamborrino

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is typically used when the likelihood is either unavailable or intractable but where data can be simulated under different parameter settings using a forward model. Despite the recent interest in ABC,…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-12-24 Rafael Izbicki , Ann B. Lee , Taylor Pospisil

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Hamza Anwar , Quanyan Zhu

Mechanistic models are essential tools across ecology, epidemiology, and the life sciences, but parameter inference remains challenging when likelihood functions are intractable. Approximate Bayesian Computation with Sequential Monte Carlo…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2025-11-27 Mario Castro

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has gained popularity in recent years owing to its easy implementation, nice interpretation and good performance. Its advantages are more visible when one encounters complex models where maximum…

Computation · Statistics 2016-08-19 Xiaolong Zhong , Malay Ghosh

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…

Many recent statistical applications involve inference under complex models, where it is computationally prohibitive to calculate likelihoods but possible to simulate data. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is devoted to these complex…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2011-06-15 Katalin Csilléry , Olivier François , Michael GB Blum

Many modern statistical applications involve inference for complicated stochastic models for which the likelihood function is difficult or even impossible to calculate, and hence conventional likelihood-based inferential echniques cannot be…

Computation · Statistics 2013-05-29 Simon R. White , Theodore Kypraios , Simon P. Preston

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to approximate posterior distributions in models with unknown or computationally intractable likelihoods. Both the accuracy and computational efficiency of ABC depend on the choice of…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-17 Bai Jiang , Tung-yu Wu , Charles Zheng , Wing H. Wong

Despite their widespread applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to express uncertainty, posing a challenge for reliable deployment in high stakes and safety critical domains like clinical diagnostics. Existing standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Mridul Sharma , Adeetya Patel , Zaneta D' Souza , Samira Abbasgholizadeh Rahimi , Siva Reddy , Sreenath Madathil

A vital stage in the mathematical modelling of real-world systems is to calibrate a model's parameters to observed data. Likelihood-free parameter inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computation, build Monte Carlo samples of the…

Computation · Statistics 2021-12-23 Thomas P Prescott , Ruth E Baker

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has advanced in two decades from a seminal idea to a practically applicable inference tool for simulator-based statistical models, which are becoming increasingly popular in many research domains. The…

Scientists often express their understanding of the world through a computationally demanding simulation program. Analyzing the posterior distribution of the parameters given observations (the inverse problem) can be extremely challenging.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-01-14 Edward Meeds , Max Welling

We propose a novel approach to approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) that seeks to cater for possible misspecification of the assumed model. This new approach can be equally applied to rejection-based ABC and to popular regression…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-11 David T. Frazier , Christopher Drovandi , Ruben Loaiza-Maya