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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Trevor Campbell , Tamara Broderick

Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-14 Augusto Fasano , Daniele Durante , Giacomo Zanella

We conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the mean-field variational inference for approximating posterior distributions in complex Bayesian models that may involve latent variables. We show that the mean-field approximation to the posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Wei Han , Yun Yang

We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

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)…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-26 Linda S. L. Tan , Nial Friel

The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-10-18 Rubén Loaiza-Maya , Didier Nibbering

Model comparison is the cornerstone of theoretical progress in psychological research. Common practice overwhelmingly relies on tools that evaluate competing models by balancing in-sample descriptive adequacy against model flexibility, with…

Applications · Statistics 2021-10-11 Viet-Hung Dao , David Gunawan , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Robert Kohn , Guy E. Hawkins , Scott D. Brown

Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…

Computation · Statistics 2015-05-20 Tim Salimans , Diederik P. Kingma , Max Welling

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

This tutorial gives a quick introduction to Variational Bayes (VB), also called Variational Inference or Variational Approximation, from a practical point of view. The paper covers a range of commonly used VB methods and an attempt is made…

Computation · Statistics 2021-03-03 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Trong-Nghia Nguyen , Viet-Hung Dao

Variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a fast and computationally-efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for scalable Bayesian estimation of mixed multinomial logit (MMNL) models. It has been established…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-13 Prateek Bansal , Rico Krueger , Michel Bierlaire , Ricardo A. Daziano , Taha H. Rashidi

There has been an intense development on the estimation of a sparse regression coefficient vector in statistics, machine learning and related fields. In this paper, we focus on the Bayesian approach to this problem, where sparsity is…

Computation · Statistics 2016-02-25 Xichen Huang , Jin Wang , Feng Liang

A framework is presented for fitting inverse problem models via variational Bayes approximations. This methodology guarantees flexibility to statistical model specification for a broad range of applications, good accuracy and reduced model…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-05 Luca Maestrini , Robert G. Aykroyd , Matt P. Wand

Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Francesco Silvestrin , Chengkun Li , Luigi Acerbi

Linear regression with measurement error in the covariates is a heavily studied topic, however, the statistics/econometrics literature is almost silent to estimating a multi-equation model with measurement error. This paper considers a…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-15 Georges Bresson , Anoop Chaturvedi , Mohammad Arshad Rahman , Shalabh

Motivation: Assigning RNA-seq reads to their transcript of origin is a fundamental task in transcript expression estimation. Where ambiguities in assignments exist due to transcripts sharing sequence, e.g. alternative isoforms or alleles,…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2015-07-01 James Hensman , Panagiotis Papastamoulis , Peter Glaus , Antti Honkela , Magnus Rattray

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…

Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-20 Shrijita Bhattacharya , Zihuan Liu , Tapabrata Maiti

The quantile varying coefficient (VC) model can flexibly capture dynamical patterns of regression coefficients. In addition, due to the quantile check loss function, it is robust against outliers and heavy-tailed distributions of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-07-11 Fei Zhou , Jie Ren , Shuangge Ma , Cen Wu