Related papers: A deterministic and computable Bernstein-von Mises…
Gaussian approximations are routinely employed in Bayesian statistics to ease inference when the target posterior is intractable. Although these approximations are asymptotically justified by Bernstein-von Mises type results, in practice…
This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…
We examine the estimation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the use of the goodness-of-fit test for multivariate continuous distributions. Our starting point is the maximum entropy principle for Shannon entropy: among all…
In this paper we examine the implications of the statistical large sample theory for the computational complexity of Bayesian and quasi-Bayesian estimation carried out using Metropolis random walks. Our analysis is motivated by the…
The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…
We consider the problem of estimating probability density functions based on sample data, using a finite mixture of densities from some component class. To this end, we introduce the $h$-lifted Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence as a…
Consider the nonparametric logistic regression problem. In the logistic regression, we usually consider the maximum likelihood estimator, and the excess risk is the expectation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and…
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…
To the frequentist who computes posteriors, not all priors are useful asymptotically: in this paper Schwartz's 1965 Kullback-Leibler condition is generalised to enable frequentist interpretation of convergence of posterior distributions…
In statistical classification/multiple hypothesis testing and machine learning, a model distribution estimated from the training data is usually applied to replace the unknown true distribution in the Bayes decision rule, which introduces a…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
The log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a density on the real line based on a sample of size $n$ is known to attain the minimax optimal rate of convergence of $O(n^{-4/5})$ with respect to, e.g., squared Hellinger distance. In this…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental equation of information theory that quantifies the proximity of two probability distributions. Although difficult to understand by examining the equation, an intuition and understanding…
In this paper, some new upper bounds for Kullback-Leibler divergence(KL-divergence) based on $L^1, L^2$ and $L^\infty$ norms of density functions are discussed. Our findings unveil that the convergence in KL-divergence sense sandwiches…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…
We derive a deterministic, non-asymptotic upper bound on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence of the flow-matching distribution approximation. In particular, if the $L_2$ flow-matching loss is bounded by $\epsilon^2 > 0$, then the KL…
We study empirical Bayes (EB) predictive density estimation in linear mixed models (LMMs) with large number of units, which induce a high dimensional random effects space. Focusing on Kullback Leibler (KL) risk minimization, we develop a…
Laplace-type results characterize the limit of sequence of measures $(\pi_\varepsilon)_{\varepsilon >0}$ with density w.r.t the Lebesgue measure $(\mathrm{d} \pi_\varepsilon / \mathrm{d} \mathrm{Leb})(x) \propto \exp[-U(x)/\varepsilon]$…
We study the problem of closeness testing for continuous distributions and its implications for causal discovery. Specifically, we analyze the sample complexity of distinguishing whether two multidimensional continuous distributions are…