Related papers: $\alpha$-Variational Inference with Statistical Gu…
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…
Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…
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…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a common strategy for approximate Bayesian inference, but simple methods are only available for specific classes of models including, in particular, representations having conditionally conjugate constructions…
Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…
The article addresses a long-standing open problem on the justification of using variational Bayes methods for parameter estimation. We provide general conditions for obtaining optimal risk bounds for point estimates acquired from…
We study the asymptotic consistency properties of $\alpha$-R\'enyi approximate posteriors, a class of variational Bayesian methods that approximate an intractable Bayesian posterior with a member of a tractable family of distributions, the…
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived…
Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…
We study the properties of variational Bayes approximations for exponential family models with missing values. It is shown that the iterative algorithm for obtaining the variational Bayesian estimator converges locally to the true value…
This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to…
Variational inference is a general framework to obtain approximations to the posterior distribution in a Bayesian context. In essence, variational inference entails an optimization over a given family of probability distributions to choose…
While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive datasets is often challenging, when possible at all. Indeed, the classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the…
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…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
We have utilized the non-conjugate Variational Bayesian (VB) method for the problem of the sparse Poisson regression model. To provide approximate conjugacy in the model, the likelihood is approximated by a quadratic function, yielding…