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Bayesian models often involve a small set of hyperparameters determined by maximizing the marginal likelihood. Bayesian optimization is a popular iterative method where a Gaussian process posterior of the underlying function is sequentially…
For predictive modeling relying on Bayesian inversion, fully independent, or ``mean-field'', Gaussian distributions are often used as approximate probability density functions in variational inference since the number of variational…
In this work we consider Bayesian inference problems with intractable likelihood functions. We present a method to compute an approximate of the posterior with a limited number of model simulations. The method features an inverse Gaussian…
Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…
In many instances, the application of approximate Bayesian methods is hampered by two practical features: 1) the requirement to project the data down to low-dimensional summary, including the choice of this projection, which ultimately…
In classification tasks, softmax functions are ubiquitously used as output activations to produce predictive probabilities. Such outputs only capture aleatoric uncertainty. To capture epistemic uncertainty, approximate Gaussian inference…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Simulator-based models are models for which the likelihood is intractable but simulation of synthetic data is possible. They are often used to describe complex real-world phenomena, and as such can often be misspecified in practice.…
We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other nonsmooth. The key highlight is a natural property of the resulting problem's structure that yields a…
In a general class of Bayesian nonparametric models, we prove that the posterior distribution can be asymptotically approximated by a Gaussian process. Our results apply to nonparametric exponential family that contains both Gaussian and…
Many statistical models can be simulated forwards but have intractable likelihoods. Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) methods are used to infer properties of these models from data. Traditionally these methods approximate the posterior…
We analyze the dynamics of an algorithm for approximate inference with large Gaussian latent variable models in a student-teacher scenario. To model nontrivial dependencies between the latent variables, we assume random covariance matrices…
Many methods have been proposed to quantify the predictive uncertainty associated with the outputs of deep neural networks. Among them, ensemble methods often lead to state-of-the-art results, though they require modifications to the…
Approximate Bayesian inference on the basis of summary statistics is well-suited to complex problems for which the likelihood is either mathematically or computationally intractable. However the methods that use rejection suffer from the…
Empirical Bayes methods are widely used for large-scale estimation and inference in the Poisson means problem. Existing results establish theoretical properties of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) for optimal posterior…
The Bayesian Synthetic Likelihood (BSL) method is a widely-used tool for likelihood-free Bayesian inference. This method assumes that some summary statistics are normally distributed, which can be incorrect in many applications. We propose…
We advocate for a new paradigm of cosmological likelihood-based inference, leveraging recent developments in machine learning and its underlying technology, to accelerate Bayesian inference in high-dimensional settings. Specifically, we…
Synthetic likelihood (SL) is a strategy for parameter inference when the likelihood function is analytically or computationally intractable. In SL, the likelihood function of the data is replaced by a multivariate Gaussian density over…
A practical challenge for structural estimation is the requirement to accurately minimize a sample objective function which is often non-smooth, non-convex, or both. This paper proposes a simple algorithm designed to find accurate solutions…
Numerical weather forecasts can exhibit systematic errors due to simplifying model assumptions and computational approximations. Statistical postprocessing is a statistical approach to correcting such biases. A statistical postprocessing…