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We study the convergence rates of empirical Bayes posterior distributions for nonparametric and high-dimensional inference. We show that as long as the hyperparameter set is discrete, the empirical Bayes posterior distribution induced by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-10 Fengshuo Zhang , Chao Gao

Hierarchical models are versatile tools for joint modeling of data sets arising from different, but related, sources. Fully Bayesian inference may, however, become computationally prohibitive if the source-specific data models are complex,…

Computation · Statistics 2016-05-06 Ritabrata Dutta , Paul Blomstedt , Samuel Kaski

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Variational autoencoders (VAE) often use Gaussian or category distribution to model the inference process. This puts a limit on variational learning because this simplified assumption does not match the true posterior distribution, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Ke Sun , Xiangliang Zhang

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,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-15 Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Shakir Mohamed

A general class of models is proposed that is able to estimate the whole predictive distribution of a dependent variable $Y$ given a vector of explanatory variables $\xb$. The models exploit that the strength of explanatory variables to…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-25 Gerhard Tutz

Transformation-based methods have been an attractive approach in non-parametric inference for problems such as unconditional and conditional density estimation due to their unique hierarchical structure that models the data as flexible…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-06 Sean Plummer , Shuang Zhou , Anirban Bhattacharya , David Dunson , Debdeep Pati

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

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

Bayesian learning has been recently considered as an effective means of accounting for uncertainty in trained deep network parameters. This is of crucial importance when dealing with small or sparse training datasets. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-13 Harris Partaourides , Sotirios Chatzis

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

We propose a robust and scalable framework for variational Bayes (VB) that effectively handles outliers and contamination of arbitrary nature in large datasets. Our approach divides the dataset into disjoint subsets, computes the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-18 Carlos Misael Madrid Padilla , Shitao Fan , Lizhen Lin

The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-02-14 Simon Arridge , Kazufumi Ito , Bangti Jin , Chen Zhang

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide variety of tasks. However, quantifying uncertainty in the network's output is a challenging task. Bayesian models offer a mathematical framework to reason about model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Manikanta Srikar Yellapragada , Chandra Prakash Konkimalla

In recent years, neural networks have revolutionized various domains, yet challenges such as hyperparameter tuning and overfitting remain significant hurdles. Bayesian neural networks offer a framework to address these challenges by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Hayk Amirkhanian , Marco F. Huber

Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Alexander A. Alemi , Ben Poole

We propose a fast and theoretically grounded method for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging in latent variable regression models. Our framework addresses three interrelated challenges: (i) intractable marginal likelihoods, (ii)…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-16 Gregor Zens , Mark F. J. Steel

We study high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression with product priors. Using the nascent theory of non-linear large deviations (Chatterjee and Dembo,2016), we derive sufficient conditions for the leading-order correctness of the naive…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-04-27 Sumit Mukherjee , Subhabrata Sen

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-23 Yusheng Xie , Nan Du , Wei Fan , Jing Zhai , Weicheng Zhu