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Despite the popularism of Bayesian neural networks in recent years, its use is somewhat limited in complex and big data situations due to the computational cost associated with full posterior evaluations. Variational Bayes (VB) provides a…
Bayesian predictive inference propagates parameter uncertainty to quantities of interest through the posterior-predictive distribution. In practice, this is typically performed using a two-stage procedure: first approximating the posterior…
This tutorial gives a quick introduction to Variational Bayes (VB), also called Variational Inference or Variational Approximation, from a practical point of view. The paper covers a range of commonly used VB methods and an attempt is made…
Variational Bayes is a popular method for approximate inference but its derivation can be cumbersome. To simplify the process, we give a 3-step recipe to identify the posterior form by explicitly looking for linearity with respect to…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
We present an algorithmic solution to the problem of incremental belief updating in the context of Monte Carlo inference in Bayesian statistical models represented by probabilistic programs. Given a model and a sample-approximated…
Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been…
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…
In Bayesian analysis, the posterior follows from the data and a choice of a prior and a likelihood. One hopes that the posterior is robust to reasonable variation in the choice of prior and likelihood, since this choice is made by the…
Mean-field Variational Bayes (MFVB) is an approximate Bayesian posterior inference technique that is increasingly popular due to its fast runtimes on large-scale datasets. However, even when MFVB provides accurate posterior means for…
The spatial error model (SEM) is a type of simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) model for analysing spatially correlated data. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most widely used Bayesian methods for estimating SEM, but it has…
Spatial count data models are used to explain and predict the frequency of phenomena such as traffic accidents in geographically distinct entities such as census tracts or road segments. These models are typically estimated using Bayesian…
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…
The multinomial probit model is often used to analyze choice behaviour. However, estimation with existing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is computationally costly, which limits its applicability to large choice data sets. This…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…
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…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
In high-dimensions, the prior tails can have a significant effect on both posterior computation and asymptotic concentration rates. To achieve optimal rates while keeping the posterior computations relatively simple, an empirical Bayes…
Variational inference is an approximation framework for Bayesian inference that seeks to improve quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters to stand in for the full posterior. Capturing…