Related papers: Copula-like Variational Inference
Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…
We develop a general variational inference method that preserves dependency among the latent variables. Our method uses copulas to augment the families of distributions used in mean-field and structured approximations. Copulas model the…
We introduce a new family of copula densities constructed from univariate distributions on $[0,1]$. Although our construction is structurally simple, the resulting family is versatile: it includes both smooth and irregular examples, and…
This paper introduces vector copulas associated with multivariate distributions with given multivariate marginals, based on the theory of measure transportation, and establishes a vector version of Sklar's theorem. The latter provides a…
Copula models are flexible tools to represent complex structures of dependence for multivariate random variables. According to Sklar's theorem (Sklar, 1959), any d-dimensional absolutely continuous density can be uniquely represented as the…
We utilize copulas to constitute a unified framework for constructing and optimizing variational proposals in hierarchical Bayesian models. For models with continuous and non-Gaussian hidden variables, we propose a semiparametric and…
Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…
Variational methods are attractive for computing Bayesian inference for highly parametrized models and large datasets where exact inference is impractical. They approximate a target distribution - either the posterior or an augmented…
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…
Copulas are a powerful tool for modeling multivariate distributions as they allow to separately estimate the univariate marginal distributions and the joint dependency structure. However, known parametric copulas offer limited flexibility…
The choice of approximate posterior distribution is one of the core problems in variational inference. Most applications of variational inference employ simple families of posterior approximations in order to allow for efficient inference,…
Although there is much recent work developing flexible variational methods for Bayesian computation, Gaussian approximations with structured covariance matrices are often preferred computationally in high-dimensional settings. This paper…
This paper introduces two families of probability distributions for Bayesian analysis of hypertoroidal data. The first family consists of symmetric distributions derived from the projection of multivariate normal distributions under…
Copula-based models provide a great deal of flexibility in modelling multivariate distributions, allowing for the specifications of models for the marginal distributions separately from the dependence structure (copula) that links them to…
We propose a new semi-parametric distributional regression smoother that is based on a copula decomposition of the joint distribution of the vector of response values. The copula is high-dimensional and constructed by inversion of a pseudo…
We propose a new highly flexible and tractable Bayesian approach to undertake variable selection in non-Gaussian regression models. It uses a copula decomposition for the joint distribution of observations on the dependent variable. This…
Key to effective generic, or "black-box", variational inference is the selection of an approximation to the target density that balances accuracy and speed. Copula models are promising options, but calibration of the approximation can be…
Variational methods are widely used for approximate posterior inference. However, their use is typically limited to families of distributions that enjoy particular conjugacy properties. To circumvent this limitation, we propose a family of…
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…
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)…