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Related papers: Learning Approximately Objective Priors

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We introduce a new method for learning Bayesian neural networks, treating them as a stack of multivariate Bayesian linear regression models. The main idea is to infer the layerwise posterior exactly if we know the target outputs of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Richard Kurle , Alexej Klushyn , Ralf Herbrich

Enforcing complex (e.g., nonconvex) operational constraints is a critical challenge in real-world learning and control systems. However, existing methods struggle to efficiently enforce general classes of constraints. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Maria Chzhen , Priya L. Donti

The knowledge gradient is a popular acquisition function in Bayesian optimization (BO) for optimizing black-box objectives with noisy function evaluations. Many practical settings, however, allow only pairwise comparison queries, yielding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner

Approximate learning machines have become popular in the era of small devices, including quantised, factorised, hashed, or otherwise compressed predictors, and the quest to explain and guarantee good generalisation abilities for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Andrew J. Turner , Ata Kabán

For many years it was routine to use equal model prior probabilities in Bayesian model uncertainty analysis. At least twenty years ago it became clear that this was problematic, leading to support of much too large models in the…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-23 James Berger , Gonzalo García-Donato , Elías Moreno , Luis Pericchi

For stochastic models with intractable likelihood functions, approximate Bayesian computation offers a way of approximating the true posterior through repeated comparisons of observations with simulated model outputs in terms of a small set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Carlo Albert , Simone Ulzega , Firat Ozdemir , Fernando Perez-Cruz , Antonietta Mira

Most deep latent factor models choose simple priors for simplicity, tractability or not knowing what prior to use. Recent studies show that the choice of the prior may have a profound effect on the expressiveness of the model,especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Hui-Po Wang , Wen-Hsiao Peng , Wei-Jan Ko

Objective probabilistic forecasts of future climate that include parameter uncertainty can be made by using the Bayesian prediction integral with the prior set to Jeffreys' Prior. The calculations involved in determining the prior can then…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2010-05-24 Stephen Jewson , Dan Rowlands , Myles Allen

In this work, we develop an objective Bayesian framework for the Dhillon probability distribution. We explicitly derive three objective priors: the Jeffreys prior, the overall reference prior, and the maximal data information prior. We show…

We propose algorithms for addressing the bias of the posterior mean when used as an estimator of parameters. These algorithms build upon the recently proposed Bayesian infinitesimal jackknife approximation (Giordano and Broderick (2023))…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-06 Yukito Iba

For in vivo research experiments with small sample sizes and available historical data, we propose a sequential Bayesian method for the Behrens-Fisher problem. We consider it as a model choice question with two models in competition: one…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-22 Antoine Barbieri , Jean-Michel Marin , Karine Florin

When related learning tasks are naturally arranged in a hierarchy, an appealing approach for coping with scarcity of instances is that of transfer learning using a hierarchical Bayes framework. As fully Bayesian computations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Gal Elidan , Ben Packer , Geremy Heitz , Daphne Koller

In Generalised Bayesian Inference (GBI), the learning rate and hyperparameters of the loss must be estimated. These inference-hyperparameters can't be estimated jointly with the other parameters, from the data, by giving them a prior.…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-18 Jeong Eun Lee , Sitong Liu , Geoff K. Nicholls

Predictive uncertainty quantification is crucial for reliable decision-making in various applied domains. Bayesian neural networks offer a powerful framework for this task. However, defining meaningful priors and ensuring computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Yijia Liu , Xiao Wang

In certain applications involving the solution of a Bayesian inverse problem, it may not be possible or desirable to evaluate the full posterior, e.g. due to the high computational cost of doing so. This problem motivates the use of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-27 Han Cheng Lie , T. J. Sullivan , Aretha Teckentrup

Trajectory planning for automated vehicles commonly employs optimization over a moving horizon - Model Predictive Control - where the cost function critically influences the resulting driving style. However, finding a suitable cost function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-20 Lukas Theiner , Sebastian Hirt , Alexander Steinke , Rolf Findeisen

Particularly in low-data regimes, an outstanding challenge in machine learning is developing principled techniques for augmenting our models with suitable priors. This is to encourage them to learn in ways that are compatible with our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Kristy Choi , Chris Cundy , Sanjari Srivastava , Stefano Ermon

In this paper, we derive a Bayesian model order selection rule by using the exponentially embedded family method, termed Bayesian EEF. Unlike many other Bayesian model selection methods, the Bayesian EEF can use vague proper priors and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-24 Zhenghan Zhu , Steven Kay

This paper addresses Bayesian inference related to partial differential equations (PDEs), particularly nonparametric regression constrained by PDEs. To effectively encode prior information, we propose a novel framework that learns a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Deyu Meng , Zongben Xu , Fang Yao

The behavior of many Bayesian models used in machine learning critically depends on the choice of prior distributions, controlled by some hyperparameters that are typically selected by Bayesian optimization or cross-validation. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-09 Eliezer de Souza da Silva , Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami