Related papers: Computing the quality of the Laplace approximation
The Laplace approximation is a popular method for constructing a Gaussian approximation to the Bayesian posterior and thereby approximating the posterior mean and variance. But approximation quality is a concern. One might consider using…
Bernstein-von Mises results (BvM) establish that the Laplace approximation is asymptotically correct in the large-data limit. However, these results are inappropriate for computational purposes since they only hold over most, and not all,…
In Bayesian inference, making deductions about a parameter of interest requires one to sample from or compute an integral against a posterior distribution. A popular method to make these computations cheaper in high-dimensional settings is…
Laplace's method approximates a target density with a Gaussian distribution at its mode. It is computationally efficient and asymptotically exact for Bayesian inference due to the Bernstein-von Mises theorem, but for complex targets and…
Logistic Gaussian process (LGP) priors provide a flexible alternative for modelling unknown densities. The smoothness properties of the density estimates can be controlled through the prior covariance structure of the LGP, but the challenge…
The Laplace approximation (LA) to posteriors is a ubiquitous tool to simplify Bayesian computation, particularly in the high-dimensional settings arising in Bayesian inverse problems. Precisely quantifying the LA accuracy is a challenging…
The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated Dirichlet…
Bayesian coresets speed up posterior inference in the large-scale data regime by approximating the full-data log-likelihood function with a surrogate log-likelihood based on a small, weighted subset of the data. But while Bayesian coresets…
In Bayesian inference, a widespread technique to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior is to use a Gaussian proxy to the posterior known as the Laplace approximation. We address the question of accuracy of the approximation…
The key operation in Bayesian inference, is to compute high-dimensional integrals. An old approximate technique is the Laplace method or approximation, which dates back to Pierre- Simon Laplace (1774). This simple idea approximates the…
Generalized linear models (GLMs) -- such as logistic regression, Poisson regression, and robust regression -- provide interpretable models for diverse data types. Probabilistic approaches, particularly Bayesian ones, allow coherent…
We consider Bayesian variable selection in sparse high-dimensional regression, where the number of covariates $p$ may be large relative to the samples size $n$, but at most a moderate number $q$ of covariates are active. Specifically, we…
This paper introduces a new method for performing computational inference on log-Gaussian Cox processes. The likelihood is approximated directly by making novel use of a continuously specified Gaussian random field. We show that for…
Laplace approximations are a standard tool for computationally efficient inference in latent Gaussian models, but they fail for quantile regression with the asymmetric Laplace likelihood because the observed Hessian vanishes almost…
Approximate Bayesian inference for the class of latent Gaussian models can be achieved efficiently with integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA). Based on recent reformulations in the INLA methodology, we propose a further extension…
Bayesian inference on non-Gaussian data is often non-analytic and requires computationally expensive approximations such as sampling or variational inference. We propose an approximate inference framework primarily designed to be…
We establish bounds on the KL divergence between two multivariate Gaussian distributions in terms of the Hamming distance between the edge sets of the corresponding graphical models. We show that the KL divergence is bounded below by a…
Gaussian processes are distributions over functions that are versatile and mathematically convenient priors in Bayesian modelling. However, their use is often impeded for data with large numbers of observations, $N$, due to the cubic (in…
Laplace approximation is a very useful tool in Bayesian inference and it claims a nearly Gaussian behavior of the posterior. \cite{SpLaplace2022} established some rather accurate finite sample results about the quality of Laplace…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…