Related papers: A note on the role of projectivity in likelihood-b…
Linear structural equation models postulate noisy linear relationships between variables of interest. Each model corresponds to a path diagram, which is a mixed graph with directed edges that encode the domains of the linear functions and…
Probabilistic graphical models that encode an underlying Markov random field are fundamental building blocks of generative modeling to learn latent representations in modern multivariate data sets with complex dependency structures. Among…
Exponential random graph models are an important tool in the statistical analysis of data. However, Bayesian parameter estimation for these models is extremely challenging, since evaluation of the posterior distribution typically involves…
We characterise the unbiasedness of the score function, viewed as an inference function for a class of finite mixture models. The models studied represent the situation where there is a stratification of the observations in a finite number…
Suppose we are given the conditional probability of one variable given some other variables.Normally the full joint distribution over the conditioning variablesis required to determine the probability of the conditioned variable.Under what…
Compartmental models of epidemics are widely used to forecast the effects of communicable diseases such as COVID-19 and to guide policy. Although it has long been known that such processes take place on social networks, the assumption of…
Assuming we have iid observations from two unknown probability density functions (pdfs), $p$ and $q$, the likelihood-ratio estimation (LRE) is an elegant approach to compare the two pdfs only by relying on the available data. In this paper,…
When are inferences (whether Direct-Likelihood, Bayesian, or Frequentist) obtained from partial data valid? This paper answers this question by offering a new asymptotic theory about inference with missing data that is more general than…
Likelihood-free inference refers to inference when a likelihood function cannot be explicitly evaluated, which is often the case for models based on simulators. Most of the literature is based on sample-based `Approximate Bayesian…
Variational Bayesian posterior inference often requires simplifying approximations such as mean-field parametrisation to ensure tractability. However, prior work has associated the variational mean-field approximation for Bayesian neural…
In many statistical problems, the data distribution is specified through a generative process for which the likelihood function is analytically intractable, yet inference on the associated model parameters remains of primary interest. We…
A very popular class of models for networks posits that each node is represented by a point in a continuous latent space, and that the probability of an edge between nodes is a decreasing function of the distance between them in this latent…
We revisit the problem of the existence of the maximum likelihood estimate for multi-class logistic regression. We show that one method of ensuring its existence is by assigning positive probability to every class in the sample dataset. The…
Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
The likelihood function plays a pivotal role in statistical inference; it is adaptable to a wide range of models and the resultant estimators are known to have good properties. However, these results hinge on correct specification of the…
We offer our two cents to the ongoing discussion on whether profile likelihoods are "true" likelihood functions, by showing that the profile likelihood function can in fact be identical to a marginal likelihood in the special case of normal…
A wide variety of model explanation approaches have been proposed in recent years, all guided by very different rationales and heuristics. In this paper, we take a new route and cast interpretability as a statistical inference problem. We…
Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation is widely used in statistics. The h-likelihood has been proposed as an extension of Fisher's likelihood to statistical models including unobserved latent variables of recent interest. Its advantage is that…
Engineering projects are the result of the combined effort of their members. Yet, it has been documented that labor division withing projects is unevenly distributed: some project members are specialists undertaking only few tasks, whereas…