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$\alpha$-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

In Bayesian machine learning, the posterior distribution is typically computationally intractable, hence variational inference is often required. In this approach, an evidence lower bound on the log likelihood of data is maximized during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Stephen Odaibo

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 Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model's posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Qile Zhu , Jianlin Su , Wei Bi , Xiaojiang Liu , Xiyao Ma , Xiaolin Li , Dapeng Wu

High-dimensional linear models have been widely studied, but the developments in high-dimensional generalized linear models, or GLMs, have been slower. In this paper, we propose an empirical or data-driven prior leading to an empirical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-09 Yiqi Tang , Ryan Martin

Bayesian inference typically requires the computation of an approximation to the posterior distribution. An important requirement for an approximate Bayesian inference algorithm is to output high-accuracy posterior mean and uncertainty…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-03 Jonathan H. Huggins , Trevor Campbell , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Tamara Broderick

We propose a new model selection method, the posterior averaging information criterion, for Bayesian model assessment from a predictive perspective. The theoretical foundation is built on the Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-22 Shouhao Zhou

Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-10 Giuseppe Arena , Maarten Marsman

Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-26 Linda S. L. Tan , Nial Friel

The Laplace approximation (LA) has been proposed as a method for approximating the marginal likelihood of statistical models with latent variables. However, the approximate maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) based on the LA are often…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-21 Jeongseop Han , Youngjo Lee

In this paper, we consider the problem of parametric empirical Bayes estimation of an i.i.d. prior in high-dimensional Bayesian linear regression, with random design. We obtain the asymptotic distribution of the variational Empirical Bayes…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Seunghyun Lee , Nabarun Deb

Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-09 Aoxiang Chen , David J. Nott , Linda S. L. Tan

A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-05-14 Jan Luts , John T. Ormerod

In some misspecified settings, the posterior distribution in Bayesian statistics may lead to inconsistent estimates. To fix this issue, it has been suggested to replace the likelihood by a pseudo-likelihood, that is the exponential of a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-12 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are perhaps the most commonly used class of models in statistical applications. Nevertheless, in areas ranging from longitudinal studies in biostatistics to geostatistics, it is easy to find datasets that…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-22 Rafael Cabral , David Bolin , Håvard Rue

Parameter inference for linear and non-Gaussian state space models is challenging because the likelihood function contains an intractable integral over the latent state variables. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide exact…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-22 Bao Anh Vu , David Gunawan , Andrew Zammit-Mangion

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-07 Kolyan Ray , Botond Szabo , Gabriel Clara

In applications of Bayesian procedures, once a class of priors has been chosen, it may be tempting to fix the prior's hyperparameters from the data, in an empirical Bayes (EB) fashion, usually by their maximum marginal likelihood estimates…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Stefano Rizzelli , Judith Rousseau , Sonia Petrone

The prominent Bernstein -- von Mises (BvM) result claims that the posterior distribution after centering by the efficient estimator and standardizing by the square root of the total Fisher information is nearly standard normal. In…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-02 Vladimir Spokoiny , Maxim Panov

Bayesian approach, as a useful tool for quantifying uncertainties, has been widely used for solving inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). One of the key difficulties for employing Bayesian approach for the issue is how…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Qian Zhao , Zongben Xu , Deyu Meng , Yee Leung