English
Related papers

Related papers: Covariances, Robustness, and Variational Bayes

200 papers

We propose a robust and scalable variational Bayes (VB) framework designed to effectively handle contamination and outliers in dataset. Our approach partitions the data into $m$ disjoint subsets and formulates a joint optimization problem…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Jiawei Yan , Ju Liu , Weidong Liu , Jiyuan Tu

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 John Paisley , David Blei , Michael Jordan

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen

Bayesian hierarchical models are increasing popular in economics. When using hierarchical models, it is useful not only to calculate posterior expectations, but also to measure the robustness of these expectations to reasonable alternative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-24 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick , Rachael Meager , Jonathan Huggins , Michael Jordan

Variational Bayes (VB), also known as independent mean-field approximation, has become a popular method for Bayesian network inference in recent years. Its application is vast, e.g. in neural network, compressed sensing, clustering, etc. to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Viet Hung Tran

The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-10-18 Rubén Loaiza-Maya , Didier Nibbering

A key challenge for modern Bayesian statistics is how to perform scalable inference of posterior distributions. To address this challenge, variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-09 Yixin Wang , David M. Blei

The log-logistic regression model is one of the most commonly used accelerated failure time (AFT) models in survival analysis, for which statistical inference methods are mainly established under the frequentist framework. Recently,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-11 Chengqian Xian , Camila P. E. de Souza , Wenqing He , Felipe F. Rodrigues , Renfang Tian

This paper establishes the asymptotic consistency of the {\it loss-calibrated variational Bayes} (LCVB) method. LCVB was proposed in~\cite{LaSiGh2011} as a method for approximately computing Bayesian posteriors in a `loss aware' manner.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-05 Prateek Jaiswal , Harsha Honnappa , Vinayak A. Rao

Model comparison is the cornerstone of theoretical progress in psychological research. Common practice overwhelmingly relies on tools that evaluate competing models by balancing in-sample descriptive adequacy against model flexibility, with…

Applications · Statistics 2021-10-11 Viet-Hung Dao , David Gunawan , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Robert Kohn , Guy E. Hawkins , Scott D. Brown

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-09-28 Zhijian He , Zhenghang Xu , Xiaoqun Wang

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

We describe a limitation in the expressiveness of the predictive uncertainty estimate given by mean-field variational inference (MFVI), a popular approximate inference method for Bayesian neural networks. In particular, MFVI fails to give…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-28 Andrew Y. K. Foong , Yingzhen Li , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Richard E. Turner

Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-14 Augusto Fasano , Daniele Durante , Giacomo Zanella

Bayesian inference for Markov processes has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Problems of this type often have intractable likelihoods and prior knowledge about model rate parameters is often poor. Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2014-10-23 Jamie Owen , Darren J. Wilkinson , Colin S. Gillespie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Richard Kurle , Ralf Herbrich , Tim Januschowski , Yuyang Wang , Jan Gasthaus

Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Francesco Silvestrin , Chengkun Li , Luigi Acerbi

We propose to perform mean-field variational inference (MFVI) in a rotated coordinate system that reduces correlations between variables. The rotation is determined by principal component analysis (PCA) of a cross-covariance matrix…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-10 Yifan Chen , Sifan Liu

Variational logistic regression is a popular method for approximate Bayesian inference seeing wide-spread use in many areas of machine learning including: Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning and multi-instance learning to name a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Michael Komodromos , Marina Evangelou , Sarah Filippi