Related papers: Universal Boosting Variational Inference
The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…
Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…
We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term…
Gradient boosting, a method of building additive ensembles from weak learners, has established itself as a practical and theoretically-motivated approach to approximate functions, especially using decision tree weak learners. Comparable…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…
We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…
Boosting techniques from the field of statistical learning have grown to be a popular tool for estimating and selecting predictor effects in various regression models and can roughly be separated in two general approaches, namely gradient…
Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…
Gradient boosting algorithms construct a regression predictor using a linear combination of ``base learners''. Boosting also offers an approach to obtaining robust non-parametric regression estimators that are scalable to applications with…
We introduce TrustVI, a fast second-order algorithm for black-box variational inference based on trust-region optimization and the reparameterization trick. At each iteration, TrustVI proposes and assesses a step based on minibatches of…
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) methods due to their ability to rapidly generate samples from complex distributions. However, since the likelihood of these samples is non-trivial to…
Gradient boosting from the field of statistical learning is widely known as a powerful framework for estimation and selection of predictor effects in various regression models by adapting concepts from classification theory. Current…
Compared to the wide array of advanced Monte Carlo methods supported by modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), PPL support for variational inference (VI) is less developed: users are typically limited to a predefined selection…
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…
We introduce a class of generic spike-and-slab priors for high-dimensional linear regression with grouped variables and present a Coordinate-ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for obtaining an optimal variational Bayes…
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
We present a new procedure for enhanced variable selection for component-wise gradient boosting. Statistical boosting is a computational approach that emerged from machine learning, which allows to fit regression models in the presence of…