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It is difficult to use subsampling with variational inference in hierarchical models since the number of local latent variables scales with the dataset. Thus, inference in hierarchical models remains a challenge at large scale. It is…
Variational methods are attractive for computing Bayesian inference for highly parametrized models and large datasets where exact inference is impractical. They approximate a target distribution - either the posterior or an augmented…
Dynamic factor models are often estimated by point-estimation methods, disregarding parameter uncertainty. We propose a method accounting for parameter uncertainty by means of posterior approximation, using variational inference. Our…
Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning…
Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…
Factorization machines (FMs) are a powerful tool for regression and classification in the context of sparse observations, that has been successfully applied to collaborative filtering, especially when side information over users or items is…
Many computationally-efficient methods for Bayesian deep learning rely on continuous optimization algorithms, but the implementation of these methods requires significant changes to existing code-bases. In this paper, we propose Vprop, a…
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…
Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
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…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Collected data, which is used for analysis or prediction tasks, often have a hierarchical structure, for example, data from various people performing the same task. Modeling the data's structure can improve the reliability of the derived…
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 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 consider the problem of learning a Gaussian variational approximation to the posterior distribution for a high-dimensional parameter, where we impose sparsity in the precision matrix to reflect appropriate conditional independence…
Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…