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Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Cristian Parra-Aldana , Juan Sosa

On time-series data, most causal discovery methods fit a new model whenever they encounter samples from a new underlying causal graph. However, these samples often share relevant information which is lost when following this approach.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Sindy Löwe , David Madras , Richard Zemel , Max Welling

This paper presents a fast algorithm for estimating hidden states of Bayesian state space models. The algorithm is a variation of amortized simulation-based inference algorithms, where a large number of artificial datasets are generated at…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-10-14 Ramis Khabibullin , Sergei Seleznev

A common problem in Machine Learning and statistics consists in detecting whether the current sample in a stream of data belongs to the same distribution as previous ones, is an isolated outlier or inaugurates a new distribution of data. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-16 Vincent Moens

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

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…

Given observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference searches for the distribution of the model's parameters that could have yielded the data. Inference is challenging for large population studies where millions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-31 Louis Rouillard , Alexandre Le Bris , Thomas Moreau , Demian Wassermann

Given some observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference aims at obtaining the distribution of a model's latent parameters that could have yielded the data. This task is challenging for large population studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Louis Rouillard , Thomas Moreau , Demian Wassermann

Gaussian variational approximations are widely used for summarizing posterior distributions in Bayesian models, especially in high-dimensional settings. However, a drawback of such approximations is the inability to capture skewness or more…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Lucas Kock , Linda S. L. Tan , Prateek Bansal , David J. Nott

Structured additive distributional regression models offer a versatile framework for estimating complete conditional distributions by relating all parameters of a parametric distribution to covariates. Although these models efficiently…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-14 Jana Kleinemeier , Nadja Klein

We propose a method to improve the efficiency and accuracy of amortized Bayesian inference by leveraging universal symmetries in the joint probabilistic model of parameters and data. In a nutshell, we invert Bayes' theorem and estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Marvin Schmitt , Desi R. Ivanova , Daniel Habermann , Ullrich Köthe , Paul-Christian Bürkner , Stefan T. Radev

Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Stephan Mandt , James McInerney , Farhan Abrol , Rajesh Ranganath , David Blei

Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-10 Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

We consider the problem of inference in a causal generative model where the set of available observations differs between data instances. We show how combining samples drawn from the graphical model with an appropriate masking function…

Well-calibrated probabilistic regression models are a crucial learning component in robotics applications as datasets grow rapidly and tasks become more complex. Unfortunately, classical regression models are usually either probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Hany Abdulsamad , Peter Nickl , Pascal Klink , Jan Peters

Neural posterior estimation has emerged as a powerful tool for amortized inference, with growing adoption across scientific and applied domains. In many of these applications, the conditioning variable is a set of observations whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Antoine Wehenkel , Michael Kagan , Lukas Heinrich , Chris Pollard

Deep hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful latent variable generative models. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical VAE with Diffusion-based Variational Mixture of the Posterior Prior (VampPrior). We apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Anna Kuzina , Jakub M. Tomczak

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

We introduce the variational filtering EM algorithm, a simple, general-purpose method for performing variational inference in dynamical latent variable models using information from only past and present variables, i.e. filtering. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-14 Joseph Marino , Milan Cvitkovic , Yisong Yue

Learning the kernel parameters for Gaussian processes is often the computational bottleneck in applications such as online learning, Bayesian optimization, or active learning. Amortizing parameter inference over different datasets is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Matthias Bitzer , Mona Meister , Christoph Zimmer