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Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-31 Jakob Knollmüller , Torsten A. Enßlin

Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-27 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick

In applied Bayesian inference scenarios, users may have access to a large number of pre-existing model evaluations, for example from maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) optimization runs. However, traditional approximate inference techniques make…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-24 Chengkun Li , Grégoire Clarté , Martin Jørgensen , Luigi Acerbi

Variational Inference (VI) is an attractive alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) due to its computational efficiency in the case of large datasets and/or complex models with high-dimensional parameters. However, evaluating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-27 Yu Wang , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Jonathan H. Huggins

Variational Bayes (VB) is a critical method in machine learning and statistics, underpinning the recent success of Bayesian deep learning. The natural gradient is an essential component of efficient VB estimation, but it is prohibitively…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-22 Anna Lopatnikova , Minh-Ngoc Tran

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is computationally expensive, especially for complex models. Alternative methods make simplifying assumptions about the posterior to reduce computational burden, but their impact on predictive…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-27 Florian D. van Leeuwen , Sara van Erp

Variable selection in Gaussian processes (GPs) is typically undertaken by thresholding the inverse lengthscales of automatic relevance determination kernels, but in high-dimensional datasets this approach can be unreliable. A more…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-25 Hugh Dance , Brooks Paige

Conjugate priors allow for fast inference in large dimensional vector autoregressive (VAR) models but, at the same time, introduce the restriction that each equation features the same set of explanatory variables. This paper proposes a…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-08-27 Niko Hauzenberger , Florian Huber , Luca Onorante

Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2020-12-02 Cheng Zhang

We propose a novel approach to sequential Bayesian inference based on variational Bayes (VB). The key insight is that, in the online setting, we do not need to add the KL term to regularize to the prior (which comes from the posterior at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-01 Matt Jones , Peter Chang , Kevin Murphy

The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-06-12 Oskar Gustafsson , Mattias Villani

Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Andrew Wood , Moshik Hershcovitch , Daniel Waddington , Sarel Cohen , Peter Chin

Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-17 Jean Daunizeau

This paper introduces a robust and computationally efficient estimation framework for high-dimensional volatility models in the BEKK-ARCH class. The proposed approach employs data truncation to ensure robustness against heavy-tailed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Kejun Chen , Yuchang Lin , Qianqian Zhu

Many exact Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms have been developed for posterior inference in Bayesian nonparametric models which involve infinite-dimensional priors. However, these methods are not generic and special methodology must be…

Computation · Statistics 2014-05-22 Jim E. Griffin

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

Latent Gaussian models (LGMs) are widely used in statistics and machine learning. Bayesian inference in non-conjugate LGMs is difficult due to intractable integrals involving the Gaussian prior and non-conjugate likelihoods. Algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-06-06 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Aleksandr Y. Aravkin , Michael P. Friedlander , Matthias Seeger

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund

Bayesian estimation methods for sparse blind deconvolution problems conventionally employ Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) prior for modeling sparse sequences and utilize Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for the estimation of unknowns.…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-08-30 Burak Cevat Civek , Emre Ertin