Related papers: Interpolating between sampling and variational inf…
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…
Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…
We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models,…
Variational Bayesian inference and (collapsed) Gibbs sampling are the two important classes of inference algorithms for Bayesian networks. Both have their advantages and disadvantages: collapsed Gibbs sampling is unbiased but is also…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
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…
Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…
In this paper, we introduce a novel family of iterative algorithms which carry out $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Variational Inference context. They do so by ensuring a systematic decrease at each step in the $\alpha$-divergence…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. It posits a family of approximating distributions $q$ and finds the closest member to the exact posterior $p$. Closeness is usually measured…
This work investigates the stability of (discrete) empirical interpolation for nonlinear model reduction and state field approximation from measurements. Empirical interpolation derives approximations from a few samples (measurements) via…
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…
We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…
The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…
Two-sample inference for the difference of population means typically relies upon a Central Limit Theorem approximation. When data are drawn from a Negative Binomial distribution, previous work of Shilane et al. (2010) showed that a Normal…
In observational studies, the assumption of sufficient overlap (positivity) is fundamental for the identification and estimation of causal effects. Failing to account for this assumption yields inaccurate and potentially infeasible…
We establish a novel convergent iteration framework for a weak approximation of general switching diffusion. The key theoretical basis of the proposed approach is a restriction of the maximum number of switching so as to untangle and…
Variational Inference (VI) is a commonly used technique for approximate Bayesian inference and uncertainty estimation in deep learning models, yet it comes at a computational cost, as it doubles the number of trainable parameters to…
Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…
We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…
When methods of moments are used for identification of power spectral densities, a model is matched to estimated second order statistics such as, e.g., covariance estimates. If the estimates are good there is an infinite family of power…