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Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-19 David Gunawan , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Robert Kohn

Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

Robustness to noise and outliers is a desirable trait in phase retrieval algorithms for many applications in imaging and signal processing. In this paper, we develop novel robust phase retrieval algorithms based on the minimization of…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Nazia Afroz Choudhury , Bariscan Yonel , Birsen Yazici

The importance sampling (IS) method lies at the core of many Monte Carlo-based techniques. IS allows the approximation of a target probability distribution by drawing samples from a proposal (or importance) distribution, different from the…

Applications · Statistics 2017-04-21 Manuel A. Vázquez , Joaquín Míguez

Variable importance in regression analyses is of considerable interest in a variety of fields. There is no unique method for assessing variable importance. However, a substantial share of the available literature employs Shapley values,…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-05 Sinan Acemoglu , Christian Kleiber , Jörg Urban

In this paper, we introduce a new form of amortized variational inference by using the forward KL divergence in a joint-contrastive variational loss. The resulting forward amortized variational inference is a likelihood-free method as its…

Importance sampling approximates expectations with respect to a target measure by using samples from a proposal measure. The performance of the method over large classes of test functions depends heavily on the closeness between both…

Computation · Statistics 2016-09-01 Daniel Sanz-Alonso

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries has increased the demand for high-quality and customizable outputs. However, traditional alignment methods often require retraining large pretrained models, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yi Liu , Dianqing Liu , Mingye Zhu , Junbo Guo , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-12 Geonhee Han , Andrew Gelman

Optimal data detection in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems often requires prohibitively high computational complexity. A variety of detection algorithms have been proposed in the literature, offering different…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-07-02 Yong Li , Sushanta K. Mallick , Tao Zeng , Junxing Zhang

Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-05 Minh-Ngoc Tran , David J. Nott , Robert Kohn

Bayesian inference for high-dimensional inverse problems is computationally costly and requires selecting a suitable prior distribution. Amortized variational inference addresses these challenges via a neural network that approximates the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-19 Ali Siahkoohi , Gabrio Rizzuti , Rafael Orozco , Felix J. Herrmann

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-05-13 Guido Consonni , Laura Deldossi

Importance sampling is often used in machine learning when training and testing data come from different distributions. In this paper we propose a new variant of importance sampling that can reduce the variance of importance sampling-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-11 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

Employing Bayesian inference to calibrate constitutive model parameters has grown substantially in recent years. Among the available techniques, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling remains one of the most widely used approaches for…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aricia Rinkens , Rodrigo L. S. Silva , Erik Quaeghebeur , Nick Jaensson , Clemens Verhoosel

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

This short note is on a property of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence which indicates that independent Gaussian distributions minimize the KL divergence from given independent Gaussian distributions. The primary purpose of this note is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Song Fang , Quanyan Zhu

Variational Bayes (VB) is a recent approximate method for Bayesian inference. It has the merit of being a fast and scalable alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) but its approximation error is often unknown. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-05 Reza Hajargasht

Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-05 Julie Choi , Peter Glynn

Bayesian neural networks (BNN) promise to combine the predictive performance of neural networks with principled uncertainty modeling important for safety-critical systems and decision making. However, posterior uncertainty estimates depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tristan Cinquin , Robert Bamler