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Related papers: Variational Bayes under Model Misspecification

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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 Bayes (VB) is a popular and computationally efficient method to approximate the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference, especially when the exact posterior is analytically intractable and sampling-based approaches are…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-30 Jiaming Liu , Meng Li

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

We analyze the behavior of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) when the model generating the simulated data differs from the actual data generating process; i.e., when the data simulator in ABC is misspecified. We demonstrate both…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-17 David T. Frazier , Christian P. Robert , Judith Rousseau

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias

When working with multimodal Bayesian posterior distributions, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have difficulty moving between modes, and default variational or mode-based approximate inferences will understate posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-11-19 Yuling Yao , Aki Vehtari , Andrew Gelman

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-02 Nathaniel Tomasetti , Catherine S. Forbes , Anastasios Panagiotelis

Gaussian and discrete non-Gaussian spatial datasets are common across fields like public health, ecology, geosciences, and social sciences. Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are a flexible class of models for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-27 Jin Hyung Lee , Ben Seiyon Lee

Variational Bayes (VB), also known as independent mean-field approximation, has become a popular method for Bayesian network inference in recent years. Its application is vast, e.g. in neural network, compressed sensing, clustering, etc. to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Viet Hung Tran

We propose a new approach to Bayesian prediction that caters for models with a large number of parameters and is robust to model misspecification. Given a class of high-dimensional (but parametric) predictive models, this new approach…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-05-13 David T. Frazier , Ruben Loaiza-Maya , Gael M. Martin , Bonsoo Koo

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Shitao Fan , Ilsang Ohn , David Dunson , Lizhen Lin

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Antonios Alexos , Alex Boyd , Stephan Mandt

Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…

Computation · Statistics 2013-09-23 Hui Zhao , Paul Marriott

Datasets displaying temporal dependencies abound in science and engineering applications, with Markov models representing a simplified and popular view of the temporal dependence structure. In this paper, we consider Bayesian settings that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-27 Imon Banerjee , Vinayak A. Rao , Harsha Honnappa

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Laplace approximation (LA) and variational inference (VI) methods are popular approaches to Bayesian inference, each with trade-offs between computational cost and accuracy. However, a theoretical…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-16 Martin Chak , Giacomo Zanella

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

We consider Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes under a probit link with a spike-and-slab prior on the regression coefficients. Motivated by the computational challenges encountered by Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers in…

Computation · Statistics 2026-05-18 Augusto Fasano , Giovanni Rebaudo

Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-03-01 Rajarshi Guhaniyogi , Cheng Li , Terrance D. Savitsky , Sanvesh Srivastava