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Related papers: Posterior Adaptation With New Priors

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Optimization is widely used in statistics, and often efficiently delivers point estimates on useful spaces involving structural constraints or combinatorial structure. To quantify uncertainty, Gibbs posterior exponentiates the negative loss…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-23 Cheng Zeng , Eleni Dilma , Jason Xu , Leo L Duan

Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Tomasz Kuśmierczyk , Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Posterior predictive p-values are a common approach to Bayesian model-checking. This article analyses their frequency behaviour, that is, their distribution when the parameters and the data are drawn from the prior and the model…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-03-31 Patrick Rubin-Delanchy , Daniel John Lawson

In this paper we show that there is a link between approximate Bayesian methods and prior robustness. We show that what is typically recognized as an approximation to the likelihood, either due to the simulated data as in the Approximate…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-04-03 Chaitanya Joshi , Fabrizio Ruggeri

This paper develops a methodology for approximating the posterior first two moments of the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. Partially specified probability models, which are defined only by specifying means and variances, are…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-01-27 K. Triantafyllopoulos , P. J. Harrison

Bayesian models provide recursive inference naturally because they can formally reconcile new data and existing scientific information. However, popular use of Bayesian methods often avoids priors that are based on exact posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-04-29 Mevin B. Hooten , Devin S. Johnson , Brian M. Brost

Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-09 Elliot Maceda , Emily C. Hector , Amanda Lenzi , Brian J. Reich

We propose a new probabilistic method for unsupervised recovery of corrupted data. Given a large ensemble of degraded samples, our method recovers accurate posteriors of clean values, allowing the exploration of the manifold of possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Francesco Tonolini , Pablo G. Moreno , Andreas Damianou , Roderick Murray-Smith

Constraints are a natural choice for prior information in Bayesian inference. In various applications, the parameters of interest lie on the boundary of the constraint set. In this paper, we use a method that implicitly defines a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-27 Jasper Marijn Everink , Yiqiu Dong , Martin Skovgaard Andersen

We derive some simple relations that demonstrate how the posterior convergence rate is related to two driving factors: a "penalized divergence" of the prior, which measures the ability of the prior distribution to propose a nonnegligible…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-11-12 Wenxin Jiang

Discovering a unique causal structure is difficult due to both inherent identifiability issues, and the consequences of finite data. As such, uncertainty over causal structures, such as those obtained from a Bayesian posterior, are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Anish Dhir , Matthew Ashman , James Requeima , Mark van der Wilk

Bayes' theorem incorporates distinct types of information through the likelihood and prior. Direct observations of state variables enter the likelihood and modify posterior probabilities through consistent updating. Information in terms of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-19 Duncan K. Foley , Ellis Scharfenaker

In certain applications involving the solution of a Bayesian inverse problem, it may not be possible or desirable to evaluate the full posterior, e.g. due to the high computational cost of doing so. This problem motivates the use of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-27 Han Cheng Lie , T. J. Sullivan , Aretha Teckentrup

Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Giri Gopalan

In this paper, we are concerned with attributing meaning to the results of a Bayesian analysis for a problem which is sufficiently complex that we are unable to assert a precise correspondence between the expert probabilistic judgements of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-12-04 Daniel Williamson , Michael Goldstein

The statistical evidence (or marginal likelihood) is a key quantity in Bayesian statistics, allowing one to assess the probability of the data given the model under investigation. This paper focuses on refining the power posterior approach…

Computation · Statistics 2013-06-14 Nial Friel , Merrilee Hurn , Jason Wyse

We propose a Bayesian approach for recursively estimating the classifier weights in online learning of a classifier ensemble. In contrast with past methods, such as stochastic gradient descent or online boosting, our approach estimates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-09 Qinxun Bai , Henry Lam , Stan Sclaroff

We advocate for a new statistical principle that combines the most desirable aspects of both parameter inference and density estimation. This leads us to the predictively oriented (PrO) posterior, which expresses uncertainty as a…

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-03 George Papamakarios , Iain Murray

The law of total probability may be deployed in binary classification exercises to estimate the unconditional class probabilities if the class proportions in the training set are not representative of the population class proportions. We…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-02-17 Dirk Tasche