Related papers: Low-rank variational Bayes correction to the Lapla…
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…
The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…
Variational Bayes (VB) has shown itself to be a powerful approximation method in many application areas. This paper describes some diagnostics methods which can assess how well the VB approximates the true posterior, particularly with…
Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…
Laplace's method, a family of asymptotic methods used to approximate integrals, is presented as a potential candidate for the tool box of techniques used for knowledge acquisition and probabilistic inference in belief networks with…
Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…
An ordinary differential equation (ODE) model, whose regression curves are a set of solution curves for some ODEs, poses a challenge in parameter estimation. The challenge, due to the frequent absence of analytic solutions and the…
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…
Mean-field variational methods are widely used for approximate posterior inference in many probabilistic models. In a typical application, mean-field methods approximately compute the posterior with a coordinate-ascent optimization…
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…
Bayesian inference on non-Gaussian data is often non-analytic and requires computationally expensive approximations such as sampling or variational inference. We propose an approximate inference framework primarily designed to be…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
We develop variational Laplace for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) which exploits a local approximation of the curvature of the likelihood to estimate the ELBO without the need for stochastic sampling of the neural-network weights. The…
Many probabilistic models of interest in scientific computing and machine learning have expensive, black-box likelihoods that prevent the application of standard techniques for Bayesian inference, such as MCMC, which would require access to…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
The Laplace approximation is a popular method for constructing a Gaussian approximation to the Bayesian posterior and thereby approximating the posterior mean and variance. But approximation quality is a concern. One might consider using…
We have utilized the non-conjugate Variational Bayesian (VB) method for the problem of the sparse Poisson regression model. To provide approximate conjugacy in the model, the likelihood is approximated by a quadratic function, yielding…
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…
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…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…