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In this contribution, we propose a new computationally efficient method to combine Variational Inference (VI) with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). This approach can be used with generic MCMC kernels, but is especially well suited to…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

We propose a new class of learning algorithms that combines variational approximation and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Naive algorithms that use the variational approximation as proposal distribution can perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Nando de Freitas , Pedro Hojen-Sorensen , Michael I. Jordan , Stuart Russell

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) procedure for high-dimensional linear model inferences with heavy tail shrinkage priors, such as student-t prior. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of the proposed VB method and prove that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Jincheng Bai , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-08-19 Yi-Ming Hu , Martin Hendry , Ik Siong Heng

Bayesian model selection enables comparison and ranking of conceptual subsurface models described by spatial prior models, according to the support provided by available geophysical data. Deep generative neural networks can efficiently…

Geophysics · Physics 2021-05-19 M. Amaya , N. Linde , E. Laloy

Bayesian phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-24 Cheng Zhang , Frederick A. Matsen

Variational Bayes (VB) is a recent approximate method for Bayesian inference. It has the merit of being a fast and scalable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) but its approximation error is often unknown. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-05 Reza Hajargasht

We introduce a new method to price American-style options on underlying investments governed by stochastic volatility (SV) models. The method does not require the volatility process to be observed. Instead, it exploits the fact that the…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2012-07-26 Bhojnarine R. Rambharat , Anthony E. Brockwell

Neural network parametrizations have increasingly been used to represent the ground and excited states in variational Monte Carlo (VMC) with promising results. However, traditional VMC methods only optimize the wave function in regions of…

Computational Physics · Physics 2025-07-03 Huan Zhang , Robert J. Webber , Michael Lindsey , Timothy C. Berkelbach , Jonathan Weare

As modern neural networks get more complex, specifying a model with high predictive performance and sound uncertainty quantification becomes a more challenging task. Despite some promising theoretical results on the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alisa Sheinkman , Sara Wade

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful and accurate method to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, HMC techniques are computationally demanding for Bayesian neural networks due to the high…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-11 Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan , Tamer A. Zaki , Michael D. Shields

Approximate inference in probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) can be grouped into deterministic methods and Monte-Carlo-based methods. The former can often provide accurate and rapid inferences, but are typically associated with biases…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-09 Fredrik Lindsten , Jouni Helske , Matti Vihola

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), or particle filtering, is a popular class of methods for sampling from an intractable target distribution using a sequence of simpler intermediate distributions. Like other importance sampling-based methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-18 Shixiang Gu , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-01 Rajarshi Guhaniyogi , Cheng Li , Terrance D. Savitsky , Sanvesh Srivastava

Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-27 Xuejun Yu , David J. Nott , Michael Stanley Smith

Neyman-Scott processes (NSPs) have been applied across a range of fields to model points or temporal events with a hierarchy of clusters. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is typically used for posterior sampling in the model. However, MCMC's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-08 Chengkuan Hong , Christian R. Shelton