Related papers: Variational approximations using Fisher divergence
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…
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…
A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…
Bayesian phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…
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…
Neural networks are popular state-of-the-art models for many different tasks.They are often trained via back-propagation to find a value of the weights that correctly predicts the observed data. Although back-propagation has shown good…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Estimation and prediction in high dimensional multivariate factor stochastic volatility models is an important and active research area because such models allow a parsimonious representation of multivariate stochastic volatility. Bayesian…
We show how to use a variational approximation to the logistic function to perform approximate inference in Bayesian networks containing discrete nodes with continuous parents. Essentially, we convert the logistic function to a Gaussian,…
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…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
Variational inference offers scalable and flexible tools to tackle intractable Bayesian inference of modern statistical models like Bayesian neural networks and Gaussian processes. For largely over-parameterized models, however, the…
This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…
Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…
Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
In many applications in biology, engineering and economics, identifying similarities and differences between distributions of data from complex processes requires comparing finite categorical samples of discrete counts. Statistical…
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is the dominant paradigm for posterior computation in Bayesian analysis. It is common to control computation time by making approximations to the Markov transition kernel. Comparatively little attention…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…