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How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational…
Kernel methods have revolutionized the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. Their success, however, critically depends on the choice of kernel parameters. Using Gaussian process (GP) classification as a working example, this…
We propose a stochastic model predictive control (MPC) framework for linear systems subject to joint-in-time chance constraints under unknown disturbance distributions. Unlike existing approaches that rely on parametric or Gaussian…
Dynamic factor models are often estimated by point-estimation methods, disregarding parameter uncertainty. We propose a method accounting for parameter uncertainty by means of posterior approximation, using variational inference. Our…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…
In this article we consider Bayesian estimation of static parameters for a class of partially observed McKean-Vlasov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations over a fixed time interval. This problem features several obstacles to…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
Bayesian inference often faces a trade-off between computational speed and sampling accuracy. We propose an adaptive workflow that integrates rapid amortized inference with gold-standard MCMC techniques to achieve a favorable combination of…
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) is a methodology for sampling approximately from a sequence of probability distributions of increasing dimension and estimating their normalizing constants. We propose here an alternative methodology named…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
This work develops a stochastic model predictive controller~(SMPC) for uncertain linear systems with additive Gaussian noise subject to state and control constraints. The proposed approach is based on the recently developed finite-horizon…
This paper introduces a framework for speeding up Bayesian inference conducted in presence of large datasets. We design a Markov chain whose transition kernel uses an (unknown) fraction of (fixed size) of the available data that is randomly…
Varying coefficient models (VCMs) are widely used for estimating nonlinear regression functions for functional data. Their Bayesian variants using Gaussian process priors on the functional coefficients, however, have received limited…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…
In this paper we consider a variety of procedures for numerical statistical inference in the family of univariate and multivariate stable distributions. In connection with univariate distributions (i) we provide approximations by finite…
Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…
In many problems, complex non-Gaussian and/or nonlinear models are required to accurately describe a physical system of interest. In such cases, Monte Carlo algorithms are remarkably flexible and extremely powerful approaches to solve such…
This work introduces a novel multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) metamodeling approach for variance function estimation. Although devising an efficient experimental design for simulation metamodeling can be elusive, the MLMC-based approach…