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Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
Black-box alpha (BB-$\alpha$) is a new approximate inference method based on the minimization of $\alpha$-divergences. BB-$\alpha$ scales to large datasets because it can be implemented using stochastic gradient descent. BB-$\alpha$ can be…
This paper considers Importance Sampling (IS) for the estimation of tail risks of a loss defined in terms of a sophisticated object such as a machine learning feature map or a mixed integer linear optimisation formulation. Assuming only…
As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
Existing score-based methods for inverse problems often resort to approximate minimization of the KL divergence between the inversion distribution and the Bayesian posterior. Such an approximation leads to severe mode collapse and…
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived…
Interpretable machine learning has gained much attention recently. Briefness and comprehensiveness are necessary in order to provide a large amount of information concisely when explaining a black-box decision system. However, existing…
Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…
Frequentist robust variable selection has been extensively investigated in high-dimensional regression. Despite success, developing the corresponding statistical inference procedures remains a challenging task. Recently, tackling this…
This paper introduces the partial Gini covariance, a novel dependence measure that addresses the challenges of high-dimensional inference with heavy-tailed errors, often encountered in fields like finance, insurance, climate, and biology.…
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…
Latent force models are systems whereby there is a mechanistic model describing the dynamics of the system state, with some unknown forcing term that is approximated with a Gaussian process. If such dynamics are non-linear, it can be…
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…
Logistic regression involving high-dimensional covariates is a practically important problem. Often the goal is variable selection, i.e., determining which few of the many covariates are associated with the binary response. Unfortunately,…
In this paper we propose a dimension-reduction strategy in order to improve the performance of importance sampling in high dimension. The idea is to estimate variance terms in a small number of suitably chosen directions. We first prove…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…
Variational inference is an approximation framework for Bayesian inference that seeks to improve quantified uncertainty in predictions by optimizing a simplified distribution over parameters to stand in for the full posterior. Capturing…