Related papers: Variational Inference as an alternative to MCMC fo…
An important aspect of Bayesian model selection is how to deal with huge model spaces, since exhaustive enumeration of all the models entertained is unfeasible and inferences have to be based on the very small proportion of models visited.…
While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive datasets is often challenging, when possible at all. Indeed, the classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the…
Variational Bayes (VB) provides a computationally efficient alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo, especially for high-dimensional and large-scale inference. However, existing theory on VB primarily focuses on fixed-dimensional settings…
Bayesian Inference is a powerful approach to data analysis that is based almost entirely on probability theory. In this approach, probabilities model {\it uncertainty} rather than randomness or variability. This thesis is composed of a…
We consider the problem of estimating rare event probabilities, focusing on systems whose evolution is governed by differential equations with uncertain input parameters. If the system dynamics is expensive to compute, standard sampling…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
Latent space models are popular for analyzing dynamic network data. We propose a variational approach to estimate the model parameters as well as the latent positions of the nodes in the network. The variational approach is much faster than…
A Bayesian approach to the classification problem is proposed in which random partitions play a central role. It is argued that the partitioning approach has the capacity to take advantage of a variety of large-scale spatial structures, if…
Machine learning methods for computational imaging require uncertainty estimation to be reliable in real settings. While Bayesian models offer a computationally tractable way of recovering uncertainty, they need large data volumes to be…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…
Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…
We apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to the problem of parametric galaxy modeling, estimating posterior distributions of galaxy properties such as ellipticity and brightness for more than 100,000 images of galaxies taken from DC2, a…
We present a scalable approach to performing approximate fully Bayesian inference in generic state space models. The proposed method is an alternative to particle MCMC that provides fully Bayesian inference of both the dynamic latent states…
Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…
We consider Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes under a probit link with a spike-and-slab prior on the regression coefficients. Motivated by the computational challenges encountered by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers in…
In performing a Bayesian analysis, two difficult problems often emerge. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the resulting posterior distribution may be multi-modal or exhibit pronounced (curving) degeneracies.…
Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…
Variational Bayesian Monte Carlo (VBMC) is a recently introduced framework that uses Gaussian process surrogates to perform approximate Bayesian inference in models with black-box, non-cheap likelihoods. In this work, we extend VBMC to deal…
In this paper, we present a method for computing the marginal likelihood, also known as the model likelihood or Bayesian evidence, from Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), or other sampled posterior distributions. In order to do this, one…