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We propose an efficient inference method for switching nonlinear dynamical systems. The key idea is to learn an inference network which can be used as a proposal distribution for the continuous latent variables, while performing exact…
We introduce a novel nonlinear Kalman filter that utilizes reparametrization gradients. The widely used parametric approximation is based on a jointly Gaussian assumption of the state-space model, which is in turn equivalent to minimizing…
It is often of interest to assess whether a function-valued statistical parameter, such as a density function or a mean regression function, is equal to any function in a class of candidate null parameters. This can be framed as a…
Feature attribution methods, or saliency maps, are one of the most popular approaches for explaining the decisions of complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks. In this study, we propose a stochastic optimization approach…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
Probabilistic programming has emerged as a powerful paradigm in statistics, applied science, and machine learning: by decoupling modelling from inference, it promises to allow modellers to directly reason about the processes generating…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
Block-coordinate algorithms are recognized to furnish efficient iterative schemes for addressing large-scale problems, especially when the computation of full derivatives entails substantial memory requirements and computational efforts. In…
Latent variable models have been playing a central role in psychometrics and related fields. In many modern applications, the inference based on latent variable models involves one or several of the following features: (1) the presence of…
Motivated by a wide variety of applications, ranging from stochastic optimization to dimension reduction through variable selection, the problem of estimating gradients accurately is of crucial importance in statistics and learning theory.…
We introduce local expectation gradients which is a general purpose stochastic variational inference algorithm for constructing stochastic gradients through sampling from the variational distribution. This algorithm divides the problem of…
We present a new algorithm for approximate inference in probabilistic programs, based on a stochastic gradient for variational programs. This method is efficient without restrictions on the probabilistic program; it is particularly…
The reparameterization trick has become one of the most useful tools in the field of variational inference. However, the reparameterization trick is based on the standardization transformation which restricts the scope of application of…
ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…
Deep latent variable models have become a popular model choice due to the scalable learning algorithms introduced by (Kingma & Welling, 2013; Rezende et al., 2014). These approaches maximize a variational lower bound on the intractable log…
We develop new stochastic gradient methods for efficiently solving sparse linear regression in a partial attribute observation setting, where learners are only allowed to observe a fixed number of actively chosen attributes per example at…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
We consider the problem of inferring latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with a time and memory cost that scales independently with the amount of data, the total length of the time series, and the stiffness of the approximate…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Instrumental variables (IVs) provide a powerful strategy for identifying causal effects in the presence of unobservable confounders. Within the nonparametric setting (NPIV), recent methods have been based on nonlinear generalizations of…