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There has been much recent interest in modifying Bayesian inference for misspecified models so that it is useful for specific purposes. One popular modified Bayesian inference method is "cutting feedback" which can be used when the model…

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

If the prior probability distributions of all possible hypothetical true means and all possible observed means of a continuous variable are conditional on the universal set of all numbers (i.e., before the nature of a study is known and a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-05 Huw Llewelyn

We propose a method to approximate the distribution of robot configurations satisfying multiple objectives. Our approach uses variational inference, a popular method in Bayesian computation, which has several advantages over sampling-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Emmanuel Pignat , Teguh Lembono , Sylvain Calinon

Generalised Bayesian inference updates prior beliefs using a loss function, rather than a likelihood, and can therefore be used to confer robustness against possible mis-specification of the likelihood. Here we consider generalised Bayesian…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-01-12 Takuo Matsubara , Jeremias Knoblauch , François-Xavier Briol , Chris. J. Oates

Many methods for machine learning rely on approximate inference from intractable probability distributions. Variational inference approximates such distributions by tractable models that can be subsequently used for approximate inference.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Oleg Arenz , Mingjun Zhong , Gerhard Neumann

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Daniel Ward , Mark Beaumont , Matteo Fasiolo

Variational Bayes is a popular method for approximate inference but its derivation can be cumbersome. To simplify the process, we give a 3-step recipe to identify the posterior form by explicitly looking for linearity with respect to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

While Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for reasoning under uncertainty, its widespread adoption is limited by the intractability of exact posterior computation, necessitating the use of approximate inference. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 George Whittle , Juliusz Ziomek , Jacob Rawling , Maike A. Osborne

We present an error-diagnostic validation method for posterior distributions in Bayesian signal inference, an advancement of a previous work. It transfers deviations from the correct posterior into characteristic deviations from a uniform…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2013-11-05 Sebastian Dorn , Niels Oppermann , Torsten A. Enßlin

Modern neural network architectures have achieved remarkable accuracies but remain highly dependent on their training data, often lacking interpretability in their learned mappings. While effective on large datasets, they tend to overfit on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Pavia Bera , Sanjukta Bhanja

We introduce a novel uncertainty estimation for classification tasks for Bayesian convolutional neural networks with variational inference. By normalizing the output of a Softplus function in the final layer, we estimate aleatoric and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Kumar Shridhar , Felix Laumann , Marcus Liwicki

To obtain uncertainty estimates with real-world Bayesian deep learning models, practical inference approximations are needed. Dropout variational inference (VI) for example has been used for machine vision and medical applications, but VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Yingzhen Li , Yarin Gal

GNSS localization is an important part of today's autonomous systems, although it suffers from non-Gaussian errors caused by non-line-of-sight effects. Recent methods are able to mitigate these effects by including the corresponding…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-20 Tim Pfeifer , Peter Protzel

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Thomas Guilmeau , Hadrien Hendrikx , Florence Forbes

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

Finite mixture models, typically Gaussian mixtures, are well known and widely used as model-based clustering. In practical situations, there are many non-Gaussian data that are heavy-tailed and/or asymmetric. Normal inverse Gaussian (NIG)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-15 Takashi Takekawa

This paper develops a methodology for approximating the posterior first two moments of the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. Partially specified probability models, which are defined only by specifying means and variances, are…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-01-27 K. Triantafyllopoulos , P. J. Harrison

Doubly intractable problems occur when both the likelihood and the posterior are available only in unnormalised form, with computationally intractable normalisation constants. Bayesian inference then typically requires direct approximation…

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund