Related papers: Simple variance bounds with applications to Bayesi…
Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…
Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…
Density estimation is an interdisciplinary topic at the intersection of statistics, theoretical computer science and machine learning. We review some old and new techniques for bounding the sample complexity of estimating densities of…
Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…
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…
Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…
Bayesian inference offers benefits over maximum likelihood, but it also comes with computational costs. Computing the posterior is typically intractable, as is marginalizing that posterior to form the posterior predictive distribution. In…
The article addresses a long-standing open problem on the justification of using variational Bayes methods for parameter estimation. We provide general conditions for obtaining optimal risk bounds for point estimates acquired from…
The statistical inverse problem of estimating the probability distribution of an infinite-dimensional unknown given its noisy indirect observation is studied in the Bayesian framework. In practice, one often considers only…
Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods, which are applicable when the likelihood is difficult or impossible to calculate, are an active topic of current research. Most current ABC algorithms directly approximate the posterior…
Under the assumption that the distribution of a nonnegative random variable $X$ admits a bounded coupling with its size biased version, we prove simple and strong concentration bounds. In particular the upper tail probability is shown to…
We consider a Bayesian approach to variable selection in the presence of high dimensional covariates based on a hierarchical model that places prior distributions on the regression coefficients as well as on the model space. We adopt the…
The Stein couplings of Chen and Roellin (2010) vastly expanded the range of applications for which coupling constructions in Stein's method for normal approximation could be applied, and subsumed both Stein's classical exchangeable pair, as…
New lower bounds on the total variation distance between the distribution of a sum of independent Bernoulli random variables and the Poisson random variable (with the same mean) are derived via the Chen-Stein method. The new bounds rely on…
Applying an inductive technique for Stein and zero bias couplings yields Berry-Esseen theorems for normal approximation for two new examples. The conditions of the main results do not require that the couplings be bounded. Our two…
In this article, we obtain, for the total variance distance, the error bounds between Poisson and convolution of power series distributions via Stein's method. This provides a unified approach to many known discrete distributions. Several…
In this article a novel approach for training deep neural networks using Bayesian techniques is presented. The Bayesian methodology allows for an easy evaluation of model uncertainty and additionally is robust to overfitting. These are…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…
Applying Stein's method, an inductive technique and size bias coupling yields a Berry-Esseen theorem for normal approximation without the usual restriction that the coupling be bounded. The theorem is applied to counting the number of…