Related papers: Nearly Optimal Variational Inference for High Dime…

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

In this work, we focus on variational Bayesian inference on the sparse Deep Neural Network (DNN) modeled under a class of spike-and-slab priors. Given a pre-specified sparse DNN structure, the corresponding variational posterior contraction…

Currently several Bayesian approaches are available to estimate large sparse precision matrices, including Bayesian graphical Lasso (Wang, 2012), Bayesian structure learning (Banerjee and Ghosal, 2015), and graphical horseshoe (Li et al.,…

Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…

Time series analysis of fMRI data is an important area of medical statistics for neuroimaging data. The neuroimaging community has embraced mean-field variational Bayes (VB) approximations, which are implemented in Statistical Parametric…

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…

Gaussian and discrete non-Gaussian spatial datasets are common across fields like public health, ecology, geosciences, and social sciences. Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) are a flexible class of models for…

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.…

Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of…

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. Recently, some VB algorithms are proposed to handle intractable likelihoods with applications such as approximate Bayesian computation. In this paper,…

Modern approaches to perform Bayesian variable selection rely mostly on the use of shrinkage priors. That said, an ideal shrinkage prior should be adaptive to different signal levels, ensuring that small effects are ruled out, while keeping…

This paper proposes a fast two-stage variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm to estimate unrestricted panel spatial autoregressive models. Using Dirichlet-Laplace priors, we are able to uncover the spatial relationships between cross-sectional…

Parameter inference for linear and non-Gaussian state space models is challenging because the likelihood function contains an intractable integral over the latent state variables. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide exact…

For large model spaces, the potential entrapment of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods with spike-and-slab priors poses significant challenges in posterior computation in regression models. On the other hand, maximum a posteriori…

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

A key challenge for modern Bayesian statistics is how to perform scalable inference of posterior distributions. To address this challenge, variational Bayes (VB) methods have emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain…

We introduce the Variational Holder (VH) bound as an alternative to Variational Bayes (VB) for approximate Bayesian inference. Unlike VB which typically involves maximization of a non-convex lower bound with respect to the variational…

We consider Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian high-dimensional regression with continuous shrinkage priors. A common challenge with these algorithms is the choice of the number of iterations to perform. This is…