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A central challenge in statistical inference is the presence of confounding variables that may distort observed associations between treatment and outcome. Conventional "causal" methods, grounded in assumptions such as ignorability, exclude…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-09 Ellis Scharfenaker , Duncan K. Foley

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

Estimation of parameters that obey specific constraints is crucial in statistics and machine learning; for example, when parameters are required to satisfy boundedness, monotonicity, or linear inequalities. Traditional approaches impose…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-03 Lachlan Astfalck , Deborshee Sen , Sayan Patra , Edward Cripps , David Dunson

Topic models are evaluated based on their ability to describe documents well (i.e. low perplexity) and to produce topics that carry coherent semantic meaning. In topic modeling so far, perplexity is a direct optimization target. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Ran Ding , Ramesh Nallapati , Bing Xiang

We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

Recently, topic modeling has been widely used to discover the abstract topics in text corpora. Most of the existing topic models are based on the assumption of three-layer hierarchical Bayesian structure, i.e. each document is modeled as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Yi-Kun Tang , Xian-Ling Mao , Heyan Huang , Guihua Wen

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.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-29 Robert Bamler , Cheng Zhang , Manfred Opper , Stephan Mandt

Due to the growing adoption of deep neural networks in many fields of science and engineering, modeling and estimating their uncertainties has become of primary importance. Despite the growing literature about uncertainty quantification in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Brian Staber , Sébastien Da Veiga

This paper presents a novel mathematical framework for representing uncertainty in large deformation diffeomorphic image registration. The Bayesian posterior distribution over the deformations aligning a moving and a fixed image is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-01-13 Demian Wassermann , Matt Toews , Marc Niethammer , William Wells

Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Sébastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

Like mean, quantile and variance, mode is also an important measure of central tendency and data summary. Many practical questions often focus on "Which element (gene or file or signal) occurs most often or is the most typical among all…

Methodology · Statistics 2012-08-03 Keming Yu , Katerina Aristodemou

Current literature on posterior approximation for Bayesian inference offers many alternative methods. Does our chosen approximation scheme work well on the observed data? The best existing generic diagnostic tools treating this kind of…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-22 Hanwen Xing , Geoff K. Nicholls , Jeong Eun Lee

Bayesian field theory denotes a nonparametric Bayesian approach for learning functions from observational data. Based on the principles of Bayesian statistics, a particular Bayesian field theory is defined by combining two models: a…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2007-05-23 J. C. Lemm

Formulating a statistical inverse problem as one of inference in a Bayesian model has great appeal, notably for what this brings in terms of coherence, the interpretability of regularisation penalties, the integration of all uncertainties,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-12-19 Natalia A. Bochkina , Peter J. Green

Variational inference, as an alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, has played a transformative role in enabling scalable computation for complex Bayesian models. Nevertheless, existing approaches often depend on either rigid…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-21 Somjit Roy , Pritam Dey , Debdeep Pati , Bani K. Mallick

One of the core problems in statistical models is the estimation of a posterior distribution. For topic models, the problem of posterior inference for individual texts is particularly important, especially when dealing with data streams,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-08-18 Khoat Than , Tung Doan

In computational inverse problems, it is common that a detailed and accurate forward model is approximated by a computationally less challenging substitute. The model reduction may be necessary to meet constraints in computing time when…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-14 Daniela Calvetti , Matthew M. Dunlop , Erkki Somersalo , Andrew M. Stuart

Online joint estimation of unknown parameters and states in a dynamical system with uncertainty quantification is crucial in many applications. For example, digital twins dynamically update their knowledge of model parameters and states to…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-01 Liliang Wang , Alex Gorodetsky

Estimating the parameters of compact binaries which coalesce and produce gravitational waves is a challenging Bayesian inverse problem. Gravitational-wave parameter estimation lies within the class of multifidelity problems, where a variety…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-05-31 Bassel Saleh , Aaron Zimmerman , Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

This paper investigates the consistency of a posterior distribution in the single-measurement fractional Calder\'on problem with additive Gaussian noise. We consider a Bayesian framework with rescaled and Gaussian sieve priors, using a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Pu-Zhao Kow , Janne Nurminen , Jesse Railo