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This paper introduces a novel Bayesian approach to detect changes in the variance of a Gaussian sequence model, focusing on quantifying the uncertainty in the change point locations and providing a scalable algorithm for inference. Such a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-04 Lorenzo Cappello , Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla

We introduce a new variational estimator for the intensity function of an inhomogeneous spatial point process with points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space and observed within a bounded region. The variational estimator applies in a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-07-02 Jean-François Coeurjolly , Jesper Møller

A nonparametric Bayes approach is proposed for the problem of estimating a sparse sequence based on Gaussian random variables. We adopt the popular two-group prior with one component being a point mass at zero, and the other component being…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-31 Yunbo Ouyang , Feng Liang

Inverse weighting with an estimated propensity score is widely used by estimation methods in causal inference to adjust for confounding bias. However, directly inverting propensity score estimates can lead to instability, bias, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-11 Lars van der Laan , Ziming Lin , Marco Carone , Alex Luedtke

Seismic tomography is a methodology to image the interior of solid or fluid media, and is often used to map properties in the subsurface of the Earth. In order to better interpret the resulting images it is important to assess imaging…

Geophysics · Physics 2020-05-20 Xin Zhang , Andrew Curtis

Particle smoothing methods are used for inference of stochastic processes based on noisy observations. Typically, the estimation of the marginal posterior distribution given all observations is cumbersome and computational intensive. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-24 H. -Ch. Ruiz , H. J. Kappen

Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Nataša Krejić , Nataša Krklec Jerinkić , Sanja Rapajić , Luka Rutešić

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Hamza Anwar , Quanyan Zhu

Since state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation methods are often computationally demanding, we investigate whether incorporating prior information can improve uncertainty estimates in conventional deep neural networks. Our focus is on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Fabian Denoodt , José Oramas

Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-11 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

In this paper, we propose a sequential directional importance sampling (SDIS) method for rare event estimation. SDIS expresses a small failure probability in terms of a sequence of auxiliary failure probabilities, defined by magnifying the…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-14 Kai Cheng , Iason Papaioannou , Zhenzhou Lu , Xiaobo Zhang , Yanping Wang

To make decisions based on a model fit with auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), practitioners often let the variational distribution serve as a surrogate for the posterior distribution. This approach yields biased estimates of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-23 Romain Lopez , Pierre Boyeau , Nir Yosef , Michael I. Jordan , Jeffrey Regier

Importance sampling has become an indispensable strategy to speed up optimization algorithms for large-scale applications. Improved adaptive variants - using importance values defined by the complete gradient information which changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Sebastian U. Stich , Anant Raj , Martin Jaggi

Despite the rise to fame of incremental variance-reduced methods in recent years, their use in nonsmooth optimization is still limited to few simple cases. This is due to the fact that existing methods require to evaluate the proximity…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-28 Fabian Pedregosa , Kilian Fatras , Mattia Casotto

Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-05 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , David Luengo , Mónica F. Bugallo

The logistic specification has been used extensively in non-Bayesian statistics to model the dependence of discrete outcomes on the values of specified covariates. Because the likelihood function is globally weakly concave estimation by…

Computation · Statistics 2013-04-17 John Geweke , Garland Durham , Huaxin Xu

We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Corentin Salaün , Xingchang Huang , Iliyan Georgiev , Niloy J. Mitra , Gurprit Singh

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a probabilistic nonparametric representation of functions in regression, classification, and other problems. Unfortunately, exact learning with GPs is intractable for large datasets. A variety of approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-02-23 Yuan Qi , Ahmed H. Abdel-Gawad , Thomas P. Minka

In this work, we adopt a general framework based on the Gibbs posterior to update belief distributions for inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). The Gibbs posterior formulation is a generalization of standard…

Computation · Statistics 2019-07-04 Zilong Zou , Sayan Mukherjee , Harbir Antil , Wilkins Aquino

Propensity score (PS) methods are widely used to estimate treatment effects in non-randomized studies. Variance is typically estimated using sandwich or bootstrap methods, which can either treat the PS as estimated or fixed. The latter is…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-17 Baoshan Zhang , Sean M. O'Brien , Yuan Wu , Laine E. Thomas