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The identification of parameters in mathematical models using noisy observations is a common task in uncertainty quantification. We employ the framework of Bayesian inversion: we combine monitoring and observational data with prior…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 Jonas Latz , Iason Papaioannou , Elisabeth Ullmann

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods form one of the algorithmic foundations of Bayesian inverse problems. The recent development of likelihood-informed subspace (LIS) methods offers a viable route to designing efficient MCMC methods for…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-03-07 Tiangang Cui , Xin Tong , Olivier Zahm

We propose a novel approach to perform approximate Bayesian inference in complex models such as Bayesian neural networks. The approach is more scalable to large data than Markov Chain Monte Carlo, it embraces more expressive models than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-07 Joel Janek Dabrowski , Daniel Edward Pagendam

A large number of statistical models are "doubly-intractable": the likelihood normalising term, which is a function of the model parameters, is intractable, as well as the marginal likelihood (model evidence). This means that standard…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-12-11 Anne-Marie Lyne , Mark Girolami , Yves Atchadé , Heiko Strathmann , Daniel Simpson

Developing efficient Bayesian computation algorithms for imaging inverse problems is challenging due to the dimensionality involved and because Bayesian imaging models are often not smooth. Current state-of-the-art methods often address…

Computation · Statistics 2023-05-04 Marcelo Pereyra , Luis A. Vargas-Mieles , Konstantinos C. Zygalakis

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Tom Huix , Anna Korba , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

Gaussian processes are valuable tools for non-parametric modelling, where typically an assumption of stationarity is employed. While removing this assumption can improve prediction, fitting such models is challenging. In this work,…

Computation · Statistics 2019-05-02 Karla Monterrubio-Gómez , Lassi Roininen , Sara Wade , Theo Damoulas , Mark Girolami

Bayesian inference for hierarchical models can be very challenging. MCMC methods have difficulty scaling to large models with many observations and latent variables. While variational inference (VI) and reweighted wake-sleep (RWS) can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Thomas Heap , Sam Bowyer , Laurence Aitchison

Linear inverse problems are ubiquitous. Often the measurements do not follow a Gaussian distribution. Additionally, a model matrix with a large condition number can complicate the problem further by making it ill-posed. In this case, the…

Many approximate Bayesian inference methods assume a particular parametric form for approximating the posterior distribution. A multivariate Gaussian distribution provides a convenient density for such approaches; examples include the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-20 Jackson Zhou , Clara Grazian , John Ormerod

Stochastic trajectory optimization methods like STOMP enable planning with non-differentiable costs, offering substantial flexibility over gradient-based approaches. We show that STOMP implicitly minimizes the KL divergence from a Boltzmann…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongzhe Yu , Zinuo Chang , Yongxin Chen

We consider a class of linear ill-posed inverse problems arising from inversion of a compact operator with singular values which decay exponentially to zero. We adopt a Bayesian approach, assuming a Gaussian prior on the unknown function.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-12-09 Sergios Agapiou , Andrew M. Stuart , Yuan-Xiang Zhang

Doubly intractable models are encountered in a number of fields, e.g. social networks, ecology and epidemiology. Inference for such models requires the evaluation of a likelihood function, whose normalising factor depends on the model…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-25 Yu Yang , Matias Quiroz , Robert Kohn , Scott A. Sisson

High-throughput characterization often requires estimating parameters and model dimension from experimental data of limited quantity and quality. Such data may result in an ill-posed inverse problem, where multiple sets of parameters and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-04-08 Abigail N. Poteshman , Jiwon Yun , Tim H. Taminiau , Giulia Galli

Bayesian formulation of modern day signal processing problems has called for improved Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling algorithms for inference. The need for efficient sampling techniques has become indispensable for high…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-28 Apratim Shukla , Dootika Vats , Eric C. Chi

We evaluate the robustness of a probabilistic formulation of system identification (ID) to sparse, noisy, and indirect data. Specifically, we compare estimators of future system behavior derived from the Bayesian posterior of a learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-02 Nicholas Galioto , Alex Gorodetsky

Doubly intractable problems occur when both the likelihood and the posterior are available only in unnormalised form, with computationally intractable normalisation constants. Bayesian inference then typically requires direct approximation…

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

While MCMC methods have become a main work-horse for Bayesian inference, scaling them to large distributed datasets is still a challenge. Embarrassingly parallel MCMC strategies take a divide-and-conquer stance to achieve this by writing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Diego Mesquita , Paul Blomstedt , Samuel Kaski

In various industrial contexts, estimating the distribution of unobserved random vectors Xi from some noisy indirect observations H(Xi) + Ui is required. If the relation between Xi and the quantity H(Xi), measured with the error Ui, is…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-08-25 Shuai Fu , Mathieu Couplet , Nicolas Bousquet