Related papers: Markovian Score Climbing: Variational Inference wi…

Bayesian methods have shown success in deep learning applications. For example, in predictive tasks, Bayesian neural networks leverage Bayesian reasoning of model uncertainty to improve the reliability and uncertainty awareness of deep…

We establish a rigorous connection between pathwise (reparameterization) and score-function (Malliavin) gradient estimators by showing that both arise from the Malliavin integration-by-parts identity. Building on this equivalence, we…

Variational inference (VI) has become a widely used approach for scalable Bayesian inference, but its performance strongly depends on the flexibility of the chosen variational family. In this work, we propose a novel variational family that…

Variational Bayes (VB), a method originating from machine learning, enables fast and scalable estimation of complex probabilistic models. Thus far, applications of VB in discrete choice analysis have been limited to mixed logit models with…

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling…

Mean field variational inference (VI) is the problem of finding the closest product (factorized) measure, in the sense of relative entropy, to a given high-dimensional probability measure $\rho$. The well known Coordinate Ascent Variational…

Stochastic variational inference for collapsed models has recently been successfully applied to large scale topic modelling. In this paper, we propose a stochastic collapsed variational inference algorithm in the sequential data setting.…

Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…

Variational inference has experienced a recent surge in popularity owing to stochastic approaches, which have yielded practical tools for a wide range of model classes. A key benefit is that stochastic variational inference obviates the…

We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

The algorithmic Markov condition states that the most likely causal direction between two random variables X and Y can be identified as that direction with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity. Due to the halting problem, however, this notion…

Nonparametric varying coefficient (NVC) models are useful for modeling time-varying effects on responses that are measured repeatedly for the same subjects. When the number of covariates is moderate or large, it is desirable to perform…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

Discrete choice models are commonly used by applied statisticians in numerous fields, such as marketing, economics, finance, and operations research. When agents in discrete choice models are assumed to have differing preferences, exact…

Bayesian phylogenetic inference is currently done via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) with simple proposal mechanisms. This hinders exploration efficiency and often requires long runs to deliver accurate posterior estimates. In this paper,…

The methods of statistical physics are widely used for modelling complex networks. Building on the recently proposed Equilibrium Expectation approach, we derive a simple and efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…

There has been an intense development on the estimation of a sparse regression coefficient vector in statistics, machine learning and related fields. In this paper, we focus on the Bayesian approach to this problem, where sparsity is…