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Multilevel linear models allow flexible statistical modelling of complex data with different levels of stratification. Identifying the most appropriate model from the large set of possible candidates is a challenging problem. In the…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-15 Tom Edinburgh , Ari Ercole , Stephen J. Eglen

This paper develops asymptotic theory for estimation of parameters in regression models for binomial response time series where serial dependence is present through a latent process. Use of generalized linear model (GLM) estimating…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-06-06 W. T. M. Dunsmuir , J. Y. He

Standard Bayesian inference is known to be sensitive to model misspecification, leading to unreliable uncertainty quantification and poor predictive performance. However, finding generally applicable and computationally feasible methods for…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-31 Jonathan H. Huggins , Jeffrey W. Miller

The interplay between missing data and model uncertainty -- two classic statistical problems -- leads to primary questions that we formally address from an objective Bayesian perspective. For the general regression problem, we discuss the…

For complex latent variable models, the likelihood function is not available in closed form. In this context, a popular method to perform parameter estimation is Importance Weighted Variational Inference. It essentially maximizes the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-16 Badr-Eddine Cherief-Abdellatif , Randal Douc , Arnaud Doucet , Hugo Marival

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-27 Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya , Yun Yang

Recent research has made significant progress on the problem of bounding log partition functions for exponential family graphical models. Such bounds have associated dual parameters that are often used as heuristic estimates of the marginal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Pradeep Ravikumar , John Lafferty

The fully marginalized likelihood, or Bayesian evidence, is of great importance in probabilistic data analysis, because it is involved in calculating the posterior probability of a model or re-weighting a mixture of models conditioned on…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2014-01-30 Fengji Hou , Jonathan Goodman , David W. Hogg

Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-12 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Marcel Scharth , David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , Scott D. Brown , Guy E. Hawkins

Causal parameters may not be point identified in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, information about non-identified parameters, in the form of bounds, may still be recovered from the observed data in some cases. We develop a…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-02 Noam Finkelstein , Ilya Shpitser

We study Bayesian inference methods for solving linear inverse problems, focusing on hierarchical formulations where the prior or the likelihood function depend on unspecified hyperparameters. In practice, these hyperparameters are often…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-08-01 Qingping Zhou , Wenqing Liu , Jinglai Li , Youssef M. Marzouk

In statistical classification/multiple hypothesis testing and machine learning, a model distribution estimated from the training data is usually applied to replace the unknown true distribution in the Bayes decision rule, which introduces a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zijian Yang , Vahe Eminyan , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

The instrumental-variables (IV) setting is standard for partial identification of causal effects when unobserved confounding makes point identification impossible. Existing approaches face methodological bottlenecks: closed-form bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Vahid Balazadeh , Hamidreza Kamkari , Medha Barath , Ricardo Silva , Rahul G. Krishnan

Many Bayesian inference problems involve high dimensional models for which only a subset of the model variables are of actual interest. All other variables are just nuisance parameters that one would ideally like to integrate out…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-13 Fabián González , Víctor Elvira , Joaquín Miguez

A causal query will commonly not be identifiable from observed data, in which case no estimator of the query can be contrived without further assumptions or measured variables, regardless of the amount or precision of the measurements of…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-12-09 Michael C Sachs , Gustav Jonzon , Arvid Sjölander , Erin E Gabriel

The purpose of this article is to develop a general parametric estimation theory that allows the derivation of the limit distribution of estimators in non-regular models where the true parameter value may lie on the boundary of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-28 Junichiro Yoshida , Nakahiro Yoshida

Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-03-22 Hachem Saddiki , Andrew C. Trapp , Patrick Flaherty

We propose a method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of amortized Bayesian inference by leveraging universal symmetries in the joint probabilistic model of parameters and data. In a nutshell, we invert Bayes' theorem and estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Marvin Schmitt , Desi R. Ivanova , Daniel Habermann , Ullrich Köthe , Paul-Christian Bürkner , Stefan T. Radev

Empirical likelihood is a popular nonparametric statistical tool that does not require any distributional assumptions. In this paper, we explore the possibility of conducting variable selection via Bayesian empirical likelihood. We show…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-13 Yichen Cheng , Yichuan Zhao

Generalized linear models (GLMs) are fundamental tools for statistical modeling, with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) serving as the classical approach for parameter inference. While MLE performs well for canonical GLMs, it can become…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Linglingzhi Zhu , Jonghyeok Lee , Yao Xie