Related papers: Mixed Variational Inference
Bayesian inference typically relies on specifying a parametric model that approximates the data-generating process. However, misspecified models can yield poor convergence rates and unreliable posterior calibration. Bayesian empirical…
In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…
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…
The marginal likelihood is a well established model selection criterion in Bayesian statistics. It also allows to efficiently calculate the marginal posterior model probabilities that can be used for Bayesian model averaging of quantities…
Variational logistic regression is a popular method for approximate Bayesian inference seeing wide-spread use in many areas of machine learning including: Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning and multi-instance learning to name a…
Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…
This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…
Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…
Variational inference techniques based on inducing variables provide an elegant framework for scalable posterior estimation in Gaussian process (GP) models. Besides enabling scalability, one of their main advantages over sparse…
In a Bayesian inverse problem setting, the solution consists of a posterior measure obtained by combining prior belief, information about the forward operator, and noisy observational data. This measure is most often given in terms of a…
Quantile regression is a powerful data analysis tool that accommodates heterogeneous covariate-response relationships. We find that by coupling the asymmetric Laplace working likelihood with appropriate shrinkage priors, we can deliver…
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…
Gaussian processes (GPs) are Bayesian nonparametric models for function approximation with principled predictive uncertainty estimates. Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) are multilayer generalizations of GPs that can represent complex marginal…
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a…
Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…
Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are widely used in statistics and machine learning. Bayesian inference in non-conjugate LGMs is difficult due to intractable integrals involving the Gaussian prior and non-conjugate likelihoods. Algorithms…
We develop flexible methods of deriving variational inference for models with complex latent variable structure. By splitting the variables in these models into "global" parameters and "local" latent variables, we define a class of…
Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…
Laplace approximation (LA) and its linearized variant (LLA) enable effortless adaptation of pretrained deep neural networks to Bayesian neural networks. The generalized Gauss-Newton (GGN) approximation is typically introduced to improve…