Related papers: Loss function based second-order Jensen inequality…
Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…
Datasets are rarely a realistic approximation of the target population. Say, prevalence is misrepresented, image quality is above clinical standards, etc. This mismatch is known as sampling bias. Sampling biases are a major hindrance for…
Particle filters are a frequent choice for inference tasks in nonlinear and non-Gaussian state-space models. They can either be used for state inference by approximating the filtering distribution or for parameter inference by approximating…
We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us…
We introduce a highly expressive yet distinctly tractable family for black-box variational inference (BBVI). Each member of this family is a weighted product of experts (PoE), and each weighted expert in the product is proportional to a…
Maximizing the log-likelihood is a crucial aspect of learning latent variable models, and variational inference (VI) stands as the commonly adopted method. However, VI can encounter challenges in achieving a high log-likelihood when dealing…
For many important problems the quantity of interest is an unknown function of the parameters, which is a random vector with known statistics. Since the dependence of the output on this random vector is unknown, the challenge is to identify…
Mixture models are a standard tool in statistical analyses, widely used for density modeling and model-based clustering. In this work, we propose a Bayesian mixture model with repulsion between mixture components. Such repulsion helps…
We propose a new model selection method, the posterior averaging information criterion, for Bayesian model assessment from a predictive perspective. The theoretical foundation is built on the Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify the…
Linear mixed effects models are widely used in statistical modelling. We consider a mixed effects model with Bayesian variable selection in the random effects using spike-and-slab priors and developed a variational Bayes inference scheme…
Neural networks are popular state-of-the-art models for many different tasks.They are often trained via back-propagation to find a value of the weights that correctly predicts the observed data. Although back-propagation has shown good…
A stream of algorithmic advances has steadily increased the popularity of the Bayesian approach as an inference paradigm, both from the theoretical and applied perspective. Even with apparent successes in numerous application fields, a…
Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…
We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…
The problem of adaptive sampling for estimating probability mass functions (pmf) uniformly well is considered. Performance of the sampling strategy is measured in terms of the worst-case mean squared error. A Bayesian variant of the…
An initial screening experiment may lead to ambiguous conclusions regarding the factors which are active in explaining the variation of an outcome variable: thus adding follow-up runs becomes necessary. We propose a fully Bayes objective…
Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…
This paper provides a unifying view of a wide range of problems of interest in machine learning by framing them as the minimization of functionals defined on the space of probability measures. In particular, we show that generative…
While statistics focusses on hypothesis testing and on estimating (properties of) the true sampling distribution, in machine learning the performance of learning algorithms on future data is the primary issue. In this paper we bridge the…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…