Related papers: Variance reduction for dependent sequences with ap…
The posteriors over neural network weights are high dimensional and multimodal. Each mode typically characterizes a meaningfully different representation of the data. We develop Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) to automatically…
Bayesian analyses combine information represented by different terms in a joint Bayesian model. When one or more of the terms is misspecified, it can be helpful to restrict the use of information from suspect model components to modify…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…
Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates…
Functional mixed models are widely useful for regression analysis with dependent functional data, including longitudinal functional data with scalar predictors. However, existing algorithms for Bayesian inference with these models only…
We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
We address the problem of estimating steady-state quantities associated to systems of stochastic chemical kinetics. In most cases of interest these systems are analytically intractable, and one has to resort to computational methods to…
We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors…
In this paper, we introduce efficient ensemble Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods for Bayesian computations in the univariate stochastic volatility model. We compare the performance of our ensemble MCMC methods with an…
Our goal is to improve variance reducing stochastic methods through better control variates. We first propose a modification of SVRG which uses the Hessian to track gradients over time, rather than to recondition, increasing the correlation…
We present a theoretical analysis of some popular adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods in the small learning rate regime. Using the stochastic modified equations framework introduced by Li et al., we derive effective…
Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…
We propose a unifying view of two different Bayesian inference algorithms, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), leading to improved and efficient novel sampling schemes. We…
In this paper we present an enhancement of the regression-based variance reduction approaches recently proposed in Belomestny et al. This enhancement is based on a truncation of the control variate and allows for a significant reduction of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…
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…