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Many inference problems involve inferring the number $N$ of components in some region, along with their properties $\{\mathbf{x}_i\}_{i=1}^N$, from a dataset $\mathcal{D}$. A common statistical example is finite mixture modelling. In the…

Computation · Statistics 2015-01-15 Brendon J. Brewer

Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-01 Rajarshi Guhaniyogi , Cheng Li , Terrance D. Savitsky , Sanvesh Srivastava

In recent years, methods for Bayesian inference have been widely used in many different problems in physics where detection and characterization are necessary. Data analysis in gravitational-wave astronomy is a prime example of such a case.…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-10-11 Nikolaos Karnesis , Michael L. Katz , Natalia Korsakova , Jonathan R. Gair , Nikolaos Stergioulas

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

Estimation and prediction in high dimensional multivariate factor stochastic volatility models is an important and active research area because such models allow a parsimonious representation of multivariate stochastic volatility. Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2021-04-27 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

Variational inference has become a widely used method to approximate posteriors in complex latent variables models. However, deriving a variational inference algorithm generally requires significant model-specific analysis, and these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-01-03 Rajesh Ranganath , Sean Gerrish , David M. Blei

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

Sample-based Bayesian inference provides a route to uncertainty quantification in the geosciences, and inverse problems in general, though is very computationally demanding in the naive form that requires simulating an accurate computer…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-12 Tiangang Cui , Colin Fox , Michael J O'Sullivan

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias

We consider geothermal inverse problems and uncertainty quantification from a Bayesian perspective. Our main goal is to make standard, `out-of-the-box' Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling more feasible for complex simulation models by…

Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a powerful and fast-growing method for optimizing and evolving parameterized many-body wave functions, especially with modern neural-network quantum states. In practice, however, the stochastic estimators…

Strongly Correlated Electrons · Physics 2026-03-20 Zhou-Quan Wan , Roeland Wiersema , Shiwei Zhang

In many inference problems, the evaluation of complex and costly models is often required. In this context, Bayesian methods have become very popular in several fields over the last years, in order to obtain parameter inversion, model…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Luca Martino , Víctor Elvira , Javier López-Santiago , Gustau Camps-Valls

Understanding the properties of transient gravitational waves and their sources is of broad interest in physics and astronomy. Bayesian inference is the standard framework for astro-physical measurement in transient gravitational-wave…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2020-10-07 Rory Smith , Gregory Ashton , Avi Vajpeyi , Colm Talbot

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-13 Richard G. Everitt , Dennis Prangle , Philip Maybank , Mark Bell

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

Computation · Statistics 2019-04-15 Jordan Franks

Variational Bayes (VB), a method originating from machine learning, enables fast and scalable estimation of complex probabilistic models. Thus far, applications of VB in discrete choice analysis have been limited to mixed logit models with…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-01-17 Rico Krueger , Prateek Bansal , Michel Bierlaire , Ricardo A. Daziano , Taha H. Rashidi

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have become a cornerstone of many modern scientific analyses by providing a straightforward approach to numerically estimate uncertainties in the parameters of a model using a sequence of random…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2020-03-10 Joshua S. Speagle