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Related papers: Frequentist Consistency of Variational Bayes

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Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

We study data-driven decision-making problems in the Bayesian framework, where the expectation in the Bayes risk is replaced by a risk-sensitive entropic risk measure. We focus on problems where calculating the posterior distribution is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-13 Prateek Jaiswal , Harsha Honnappa , Vinayak A. Rao

We prove the weak consistency of the posterior distribution and that of the Bayes estimator for a two-phase piecewise linear regression mdoel where the break-point is unknown. The non-differentiability of the likelihood of the model with…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-06-22 Tristan Launay , Anne Philippe , Sophie Lamarche

Bayesian posterior inference is prevalent in various machine learning problems. Variational inference provides one way to approximate the posterior distribution, however its expressive power is limited and so is the accuracy of resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Guoqing Zheng , Yiming Yang , Jaime Carbonell

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Shunan Sheng , Bohan Wu , Alberto González-Sanz , Marcel Nutz

This paper aims to examine the characteristics of the posterior distribution of covariance/precision matrices in a "large $p$, large $n$" scenario, where $p$ represents the number of variables and $n$ is the sample size. Our analysis…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Partha Sarkar , Kshitij Khare , Malay Ghosh , Matt P. Wand

Consider semiparametric models that display local asymptotic exponentiality (Ibragimov and Has'minskii (1981)), an asymptotic property of the likelihood associated with discontinuities of densities. Our interest goes to estimation of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-12-19 Bas Kleijn , Bartek Knapik

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods have become increasingly prevalent of late, facilitating as they do the analysis of intractable, or challenging, statistical problems. With the initial focus being primarily on the practical…

Computation · Statistics 2015-08-24 David T. Frazier , Gael M. Martin , Christian P. Robert

The spatial error model (SEM) is a type of simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model for analysing spatially correlated data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most widely used Bayesian methods for estimating SEM, but it has…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-14 Anjana Wijayawardhana , David Gunawan , Thomas Suesse

Hierarchical parametric models consisting of observable and latent variables are widely used for unsupervised learning tasks. For example, a mixture model is a representative hierarchical model for clustering. From the statistical point of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-01-24 Keisuke Yamazaki

Many statistical problems include model parameters that are defined as the solutions to optimization sub-problems. These include classical approaches such as profile likelihood as well as modern applications involving flow networks or…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-17 Cheng Zeng , Yaozhi Yang , Jason Xu , Leo L Duan

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in employing flexible machine learning models for instrumental variable (IV) regression, but the development of uncertainty quantification methodology is still lacking. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-04 Ziyu Wang , Yuhao Zhou , Tongzheng Ren , Jun Zhu

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

We review the Bayesian theory of semiparametric inference following Bickel and Kleijn (2012) and Kleijn and Knapik (2013). After an overview of efficiency in parametric and semiparametric estimation problems, we consider the Bernstein-von…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-05-22 B. J. K. Kleijn

For the important classical problem of inference on a sparse high-dimensional normal mean vector, we propose a novel empirical Bayes model that admits a posterior distribution with desirable properties under mild conditions. In particular,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-10-31 Ryan Martin , Stephen G. Walker

Statistical modeling of multivariate and spatial extreme events has attracted broad attention in various areas of science. Max-stable distributions and processes are the natural class of models for this purpose, and many parametric families…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-09 Clement Dombry , Sebastian Engelke , Marco Oesting

When do nonparametric Bayesian procedures ``overfit''? To shed light on this question, we consider a binary regression problem in detail and establish frequentist consistency for a certain class of Bayes procedures based on hierarchical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Marc Coram , Steven P. Lalley

We establish a general Bernstein--von Mises theorem for approximately linear semiparametric functionals of fractional posterior distributions based on nonparametric priors. This is illustrated in a number of nonparametric settings and for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-12 Alice L'Huillier , Luke Travis , Ismaël Castillo , Kolyan Ray

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

Probabilistic approaches for tensor factorization aim to extract meaningful structure from incomplete data by postulating low rank constraints. Recently, variational Bayesian (VB) inference techniques have successfully been applied to large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-01 Beyza Ermis , A. Taylan Cemgil