English
Related papers

Related papers: Quantile Propagation for Wasserstein-Approximate G…

200 papers

Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular method for approximate inference in generative models with intractable but easy-to-sample likelihood. It constructs an approximate posterior distribution by finding parameters for which…

Computation · Statistics 2020-03-09 Kimia Nadjahi , Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus , Roland Badeau , Umut Şimşekli

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

We study the problem of quantifying how far an empirical distribution deviates from Gaussianity under the framework of optimal transport. By exploiting the cone geometry of the relative translation invariant quadratic Wasserstein space, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Binshuai Wang , Peng Wei

This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations that model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-10 Gabriel Peyré

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

The Poisson distribution arises naturally when dealing with data involving counts, and it has found many applications in inverse problems and imaging. In this work, we develop an approximate Bayesian inference technique based on expectation…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-09-04 Chen Zhang , Simon Arridge , Bangti Jin

We consider sampling from a Gibbs distribution by evolving a finite number of particles using a particular score estimator rather than Brownian motion. To accelerate the particles, we consider a second-order score-based ODE, similar to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-19 Hong Ye Tan , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Bayesian learning is often hampered by large computational expense. As a powerful generalization of popular belief propagation, expectation propagation (EP) efficiently approximates the exact Bayesian computation. Nevertheless, EP can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-30 Yuan Qi , Yandong Guo

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk

We formulate approximate Bayesian inference in non-conjugate temporal and spatio-temporal Gaussian process models as a simple parameter update rule applied during Kalman smoothing. This viewpoint encompasses most inference schemes,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-14 William J. Wilkinson , Paul E. Chang , Michael Riis Andersen , Arno Solin

We propose a projected Wasserstein gradient descent method (pWGD) for high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems. The underlying density function of a particle system of WGD is approximated by kernel density estimation (KDE), which faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Wuchen Li

Quantum systems are the future candidates for computers and information processing devices. Information about quantum states and processes may be incomplete and scattered in these systems. We use a quantum version of Belief Propagation(BP)…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2014-09-09 Farzad Ghafari Jouneghani , Mohammad Babazadeh , Davoud Salami , Hossein Movla

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-02 Nikolaos Gianniotis

Distribution estimation under local differential privacy (LDP) is a fundamental and challenging task. Significant progresses have been made on categorical data. However, due to different evaluation metrics, these methods do not work well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Puning Zhao , Zhikun Zhang , Bo Sun , Li Shen , Liang Zhang , Shaowei Wang , Zhe Liu

Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-11-17 Soheil Kolouri , Gustavo K. Rohde , Heiko Hoffmann

We present discretize_distributions, a Python package that efficiently constructs discrete approximations of Gaussian mixture distributions and provides guarantees on the approximation error in Wasserstein distance. The package implements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Steven Adams , Elize Alwash , Luca Laurenti

We study quantum neural networks where the generated function is the expectation value of the sum of single-qubit observables across all qubits. In [Girardi \emph{et al.}, arXiv:2402.08726], it is proven that the probability distributions…

Estimating a $d$-dimensional distribution $\mu$ by the empirical measure $\hat{\mu}_n$ of its samples is an important task in probability theory, statistics and machine learning. It is well known that $\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{W}_p(\hat{\mu}_n,…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Martin Larsson , Jonghwa Park , Johannes Wiesel

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

In this paper, we derive an explicit upper bound for the Wasserstein distance between a functional of point processes and a Gaussian distribution. Using Stein's method in conjunction with Malliavin's calculus and the Poisson embedding…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Laure Coutin , Benjamin Massat , Anthony Réveillac