Related papers: Copula Variational Bayes inference via information…

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

We develop a general variational inference method that preserves dependency among the latent variables. Our method uses copulas to augment the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximations. Copulas model the…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…

The spatial error model (SEM) is a type of simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model for analysing spatially correlated data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most widely used Bayesian methods for estimating SEM, but it has…

We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior…

Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…

Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…

Variational methods are attractive for computing Bayesian inference for highly parametrized models and large datasets where exact inference is impractical. They approximate a target distribution - either the posterior or an augmented…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian posterior inference. Though popular, VB comes with few theoretical guarantees, most of which focus on well-specified models. However, models…

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…

Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is its (sometimes severe) underestimates of the…

We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived…

Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…

We propose a new variational Bayes estimator for high-dimensional copulas with discrete, or a combination of discrete and continuous, margins. The method is based on a variational approximation to a tractable augmented posterior, and is…

The Mean Field Variational Bayes (MFVB) method is one of the most computationally efficient techniques for Bayesian inference. However, its use has been restricted to models with conjugate priors or those that require analytical…

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…

Copula models have become one of the most widely used tools in the applied modelling of multivariate data. Similarly, Bayesian methods are increasingly used to obtain efficient likelihood-based inference. However, to date, there has been…

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…

This tutorial gives a quick introduction to Variational Bayes (VB), also called Variational Inference or Variational Approximation, from a practical point of view. The paper covers a range of commonly used VB methods and an attempt is made…

The key to VI is the selection of a tractable density to approximate the Bayesian posterior. For large and complex models a common choice is to assume independence between multivariate blocks in a partition of the parameter space. While…