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Given some observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference aims at obtaining the distribution of a model's latent parameters that could have yielded the data. This task is challenging for large population studies…
Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…
In this work, we investigate the large-scale mean-field variational inference (MFVI) problem from a mini-batch primal-dual perspective. By reformulating MFVI as a constrained finite-sum problem, we develop a novel primal-dual algorithm…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…
We consider sampling from a Gibbs distribution by evolving a finite number of particles using a particular score estimator rather than Brownian motion. To accelerate the particles, we consider a second-order score-based ODE, similar to…
Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to…
Model Updating is frequently used in Structural Health Monitoring to determine structures' operating conditions and whether maintenance is required. Data collected by sensors are used to update the values of some initially unknown…
We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces…
Given observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference searches for the distribution of the model's parameters that could have yielded the data. Inference is challenging for large population studies where millions of…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…
Joint utilization of multiple discrete frequency bands can enhance the accuracy of delay estimation. Although some unique challenges of multiband fusion, such as phase distortion, oscillation phenomena, and high-dimensional search, have…
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…
Linear mixed models are a versatile statistical tool to study data by accounting for fixed effects and random effects from multiple sources of variability. In many situations, a large number of candidate fixed effects is available and it is…
Bayesian inference provides a principled way of estimating the parameters of a stochastic process that is observed discretely in time. The overdamped Brownian motion of a particle confined in an optical trap is generally modelled by the…
Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…
We present a novel approximate inference method for diffusion processes, based on the Wasserstein gradient flow formulation of the diffusion. In this formulation, the time-dependent density of the diffusion is derived as the limit of…
It is known that the Langevin dynamics used in MCMC is the gradient flow of the KL divergence on the Wasserstein space, which helps convergence analysis and inspires recent particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs). But no more…
The Wasserstein distance is a distance between two probability distributions and has recently gained increasing popularity in statistics and machine learning, owing to its attractive properties. One important approach to extending this…