Related papers: $\alpha$-Variational Inference with Statistical Gu…
Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…
Accurate tuning of hyperparameters is crucial to ensure that models can generalise effectively across different settings. In this paper, we present theoretical guarantees for hyperparameter selection using variational Bayes in the…
We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…
This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth…
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…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
We introduce the Variational Holder (VH) bound as an alternative to Variational Bayes (VB) for approximate Bayesian inference. Unlike VB which typically involves maximization of a non-convex lower bound with respect to the variational…
Bayesian inference typically relies on specifying a parametric model that approximates the data-generating process. However, misspecified models can yield poor convergence rates and unreliable posterior calibration. Bayesian empirical…
The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…
In this paper, we introduce a novel family of iterative algorithms which carry out $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Variational Inference context. They do so by ensuring a systematic decrease at each step in the $\alpha$-divergence…
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…
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…
Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…
Variational inference has become one of the most widely used methods in latent variable modeling. In its basic form, variational inference employs a fully factorized variational distribution and minimizes its KL divergence to the posterior.…
We propose a robust and scalable framework for variational Bayes (VB) that effectively handles outliers and contamination of arbitrary nature in large datasets. Our approach divides the dataset into disjoint subsets, computes the posterior…
Ising models originated in statistical physics and are widely used in modeling spatial data and computer vision problems. However, statistical inference of this model remains challenging due to intractable nature of the normalizing constant…
We propose to use L\'evy {\alpha}-stable distributions for constructing priors for Bayesian inverse problems. The construction is based on Markov fields with stable-distributed increments. Special cases include the Cauchy and Gaussian…
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…
A framework is presented for fitting inverse problem models via variational Bayes approximations. This methodology guarantees flexibility to statistical model specification for a broad range of applications, good accuracy and reduced model…
Given an intractable distribution $p$, the problem of variational inference (VI) is to find the best approximation from some more tractable family $Q$. Commonly, one chooses $Q$ to be a family of factorized distributions (i.e., the…