English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal prior for Bayesian inference in a constrai…

200 papers

The Bayesian treatment of neural networks dictates that a prior distribution is specified over their weight and bias parameters. This poses a challenge because modern neural networks are characterized by a large number of parameters, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-26 Ba-Hien Tran , Simone Rossi , Dimitrios Milios , Maurizio Filippone

A key sticking point of Bayesian analysis is the choice of prior distribution, and there is a vast literature on potential defaults including uniform priors, Jeffreys' priors, reference priors, maximum entropy priors, and weakly informative…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-11-22 Andrew Gelman , Daniel Simpson , Michael Betancourt

This paper presents a study of the large-sample behavior of the posterior distribution of a structural parameter which is partially identified by moment inequalities. The posterior density is derived based on the limited information…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-01-13 Yuan Liao , Wenxin Jiang

Bayesian hierarchical models are frequently used in practical data analysis contexts. One interpretation of these models is that they provide an indirect way of assigning a prior for unknown parameters, through the introduction of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-01 Brendon J. Brewer

In this work, we investigate the estimation of a parameter $f$ in PDEs using Bayesian procedures, and focus on posterior distributions constructed using Gaussian process priors, and its variational approximation. We establish contraction…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Yuxin Fan , Bangti Jin

In an indirect Gaussian sequence space model lower and upper bounds are derived for the concentration rate of the posterior distribution of the parameter of interest shrinking to the parameter value $\theta^\circ$ that generates the data.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-02-03 Jan Johannes , Anna Simoni , Rudolf Schenk

The Generalized Pareto (GP) and Generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions play an important role in extreme value analyses, as models for threshold excesses and block maxima respectively. For each of these distributions we consider…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-06-02 Paul J. Northrop , Nicolas Attalides

Due to their conjugate posteriors, Gaussian process priors are attractive for estimating the drift of stochastic differential equations with continuous time observations. However, their performance strongly depends on the choice of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-04 Jan van Waaij

Observational astrophysics consists of making inferences about the Universe by comparing data and models. The credible intervals placed on model parameters are often as important as the maximum a posteriori probability values, as the…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2021-12-15 Will J. Percival , Oliver Friedrich , Elena Sellentin , Alan Heavens

The prominent Bernstein -- von Mises (BvM) result claims that the posterior distribution after centering by the efficient estimator and standardizing by the square root of the total Fisher information is nearly standard normal. In…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-02 Vladimir Spokoiny , Maxim Panov

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

Prior specification for nonparametric Bayesian inference involves the difficult task of quantifying prior knowledge about a parameter of high, often infinite, dimension. Realistically, a statistician is unlikely to have informed opinions…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-05-01 David C. Kessler , Peter D. Hoff , David B. Dunson

We use the language of uninformative Bayesian prior choice to study the selection of appropriately simple effective models. We advocate for the prior which maximizes the mutual information between parameters and predictions, learning as…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-02-16 Henry H. Mattingly , Mark K. Transtrum , Michael C. Abbott , Benjamin B. Machta

Bayesian analyses require that all variable model parameters are given a prior probability distribution. This can pose a challenge for analyses where multiple experiments are combined if these experiments use different parametrisations for…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-13 Lukas Koch

Objective probabilistic forecasts of future climate that include parameter uncertainty can be made by using the Bayesian prediction integral with the prior set to Jeffreys' Prior. The calculations involved in determining the prior can then…

Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics · Physics 2010-05-24 Stephen Jewson , Dan Rowlands , Myles Allen

The behavior of many Bayesian models used in machine learning critically depends on the choice of prior distributions, controlled by some hyperparameters that are typically selected by Bayesian optimization or cross-validation. This…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-09 Eliezer de Souza da Silva , Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

We study full Bayesian procedures for high-dimensional linear regression under sparsity constraints. The prior is a mixture of point masses at zero and continuous distributions. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-10-15 Ismaël Castillo , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber , Aad van der Vaart

Using instruments comprising ordered responses to items are ubiquitous for studying many constructs of interest. However, using such an item response format may lead to items with response categories infrequently endorsed or unendorsed…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-02 R. Noah Padgett , Grant B. Morgan , Tim Lomas

When using Bayesian inference, one needs to choose a prior distribution for parameters. The well-known Jeffreys prior is based on the Riemann metric tensor on a statistical manifold. Takeuchi and Amari defined the $\alpha$-parallel prior,,…

Differential Geometry · Mathematics 2020-05-20 Ruichao Jiang , Javad Tavakoli , Yiqiang Zhao

Bayesian optimal design is a well-established approach to planning experiments. A distribution for the responses, i.e. a statistical model, is assumed which is dependent on unknown parameters. A utility function is then specified giving…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-03 Antony M. Overstall , Jacinta Holloway-Brown , James M. McGree