Related papers: Practical bounds on the error of Bayesian posterio…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
Although Bayesian methods are robust and principled, their application in practice could be limited since they typically rely on computationally intensive Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms for their implementation. One possible solution…
There is a lack of simple and scalable algorithms for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian methods quantify uncertainty through posterior and predictive distributions, but it is difficult to rapidly estimate summaries of these…
The Laplace approximation is a popular method for constructing a Gaussian approximation to the Bayesian posterior and thereby approximating the posterior mean and variance. But approximation quality is a concern. One might consider using…
A growing number of generative statistical models do not permit the numerical evaluation of their likelihood functions. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) has become a popular approach to overcome this issue, in which one simulates…
A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…
Laplace's method approximates a target density with a Gaussian distribution at its mode. It is computationally efficient and asymptotically exact for Bayesian inference due to the Bernstein-von Mises theorem, but for complex targets and…
Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular method for approximate inference in generative models with intractable but easy-to-sample likelihood. It constructs an approximate posterior distribution by finding parameters for which…
Discrete state spaces represent a major computational challenge to statistical inference, since the computation of normalisation constants requires summation over large or possibly infinite sets, which can be impractical. This paper…
Divide-and-conquer based methods for Bayesian inference provide a general approach for tractable posterior inference when the sample size is large. These methods divide the data into smaller subsets, sample from the posterior distribution…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provides asymptotically consistent estimates of intractable posterior expectations as the number of iterations tends to infinity. However, in large data applications, MCMC can be computationally expensive per…
We develop a general framework for statistical inference with the 1-Wasserstein distance. Recently, the Wasserstein distance has attracted considerable attention and has been widely applied to various machine learning tasks because of its…
Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…
Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…
The Wasserstein distance has emerged as a key metric to quantify distances between probability distributions, with applications in various fields, including machine learning, control theory, decision theory, and biological systems.…
This paper derives non-asymptotic error bounds for nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance. To obtain explicit finite-sample guarantees for the last iterate, we develop a coupling argument that compares…
Gaussian processes (GPs) offer a flexible class of priors for nonparametric Bayesian regression, but popular GP posterior inference methods are typically prohibitively slow or lack desirable finite-data guarantees on quality. We develop an…
Motivated by the growing popularity of variants of the Wasserstein distance in statistics and machine learning, we study statistical inference for the Sliced Wasserstein distance--an easily computable variant of the Wasserstein distance.…
Inexact Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods rely on Markov chains that do not exactly preserve the target distribution. Examples include the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) and unadjusted Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (uHMC). This paper…