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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

The maximum likelihood method is the best-known method for estimating the probabilities behind the data. However, the conventional method obtains the probability model closest to the empirical distribution, resulting in overfitting. Then…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-03 Akihisa Ichiki

In this note we consider the stability of posterior measures occuring in Bayesian inference w.r.t. perturbations of the prior measure and the log-likelihood function. This extends the well-posedness analysis of Bayesian inverse problems. In…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-24 Björn Sprungk

To the frequentist who computes posteriors, not all priors are useful asymptotically: in this paper Schwartz's 1965 Kullback-Leibler condition is generalised to enable frequentist interpretation of convergence of posterior distributions…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-11-28 B. J. K. Kleijn

We study predictive density estimation under Kullback-Leibler loss in $\ell_0$-sparse Gaussian sequence models. We propose proper Bayes predictive density estimates and establish asymptotic minimaxity in sparse models. A surprise is the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-01 Gourab Mukherjee , Iain M. Johnstone

We consider the asymptotic behavior of posterior distributions if the model is misspecified. Given a prior distribution and a random sample from a distribution $P_0$, which may not be in the support of the prior, we show that the posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 B. J. K. Kleijn , A. W. van der Vaart

Gaussian approximations are routinely employed in Bayesian statistics to ease inference when the target posterior is intractable. Although these approximations are asymptotically justified by Bernstein-von Mises type results, in practice…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-04-09 Daniele Durante , Francesco Pozza , Botond Szabo

We consider the inverse problem of estimating an unknown function $u$ from noisy measurements $y$ of a known, possibly nonlinear, map $\mathcal{G}$ applied to $u$. We adopt a Bayesian approach to the problem and work in a setting where the…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-09-20 Masoumeh Dashti , Kody J. H. Law , Andrew M. Stuart , Jochen Voss

We consider Bayesian linear inverse problems in infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert spaces, with a Gaussian prior measure and additive Gaussian noise model, and provide an extension of the concept of Bayesian D-optimality to the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-09-04 Alen Alexanderian , Philip Gloor , Omar Ghattas

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

In this paper we study properties of the Laplace approximation of the posterior distribution arising in nonlinear Bayesian inverse problems. Our work is motivated by Schillings et al. (2020), where it is shown that in such a setting the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-04-09 Tapio Helin , Remo Kretschmann

Accurate approximation of probability measures is essential in numerical applications. This paper explores the quantization of probability measures using the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance as a guiding metric. We first investigate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Zahra Mehraban , Alois Pichler

We propose a dimension reduction technique for Bayesian inverse problems with nonlinear forward operators, non-Gaussian priors, and non-Gaussian observation noise. The likelihood function is approximated by a ridge function, i.e., a map…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-01-31 Olivier Zahm , Tiangang Cui , Kody Law , Alessio Spantini , Youssef Marzouk

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-09 Aoxiang Chen , David J. Nott , Linda S. L. Tan

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-10-17 Lutz Duembgen , Richard Samworth , Dominic Schuhmacher

We interpret likelihood-based test functions from a geometric perspective where the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is adopted to quantify the distance from a distribution to another. Such a test function can be seen as a sub-Gaussian…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Yan Wang

In a general class of Bayesian nonparametric models, we prove that the posterior distribution can be asymptotically approximated by a Gaussian process. Our results apply to nonparametric exponential family that contains both Gaussian and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-11-01 Zuofeng Shang , Guang Cheng

We focus on Bayesian inverse problems with Gaussian likelihood, linear forward model, and priors that can be formulated as a Gaussian mixture. Such a mixture is expressed as an integral of Gaussian density functions weighted by a mixing…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-30 Rafael Flock , Yiqiu Dong , Felipe Uribe , Olivier Zahm

The Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Kullback-Leibler variation, and the Bernstein "norm" are used to quantify discrepancies among probability distributions in likelihood models such as nonparametric maximum likelihood and nonparametric…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Tetsuya Kaji

This paper deals with a method for the approximation of a spectral density function among the solutions of a generalized moment problem a` la Byrnes/Georgiou/Lindquist. The approximation is pursued with respect to the Kullback-Leibler…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2009-11-04 Augusto Ferrante , Federico Ramponi , Francesco Ticozzi