Related papers: Bayesian Model Selection, the Marginal Likelihood,…

The is no other model or hypothesis verification tool in Bayesian statistics that is as widely used as the Bayes factor. We focus on generative models that are likelihood-free and, therefore, render the computation of Bayes factors…

The Bayesian posterior minimizes the "inferential risk" which itself bounds the "predictive risk". This bound is tight when the likelihood and prior are well-specified. However since misspecification induces a gap, the Bayesian posterior…

We propose a general method for distributed Bayesian model choice, using the marginal likelihood, where a data set is split in non-overlapping subsets. These subsets are only accessed locally by individual workers and no data is shared…

I define a natural measure of the complexity of a parametric distribution relative to a given true distribution called the {\it razor} of a model family. The Minimum Description Length principle (MDL) and Bayesian inference are shown to…

Bayesian inference is used to estimate continuous parameter values given measured data in many fields of science. The method relies on conditional probability densities to describe information about both data and parameters, yet the notion…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

This is an up-to-date introduction to, and overview of, marginal likelihood computation for model selection and hypothesis testing. Computing normalizing constants of probability models (or ratio of constants) is a fundamental issue in many…

Double descent is a phenomenon of over-parameterized statistical models such as deep neural networks which have a re-descending property in their risk function. As the complexity of the model increases, risk exhibits a U-shaped region due…

Composite likelihood provides approximate inference when the full likelihood is intractable and sub-likelihood functions of marginal events can be evaluated relatively easily. It has been successfully applied for many complex models.…

There is a growing interest in the so-called Bayesian Predictive Inference approach, which allows to perform Bayesian inference without specifying the likelihood and prior of the model, or the need of any MCMC. Instead, only a sequence of…

Bayesian model selection is a tool to decide whether the introduction of a new parameter is warranted by data. I argue that the usual sampling statistic significance tests for a null hypothesis can be misleading, since they do not take into…

Typical Bayesian methods for models with latent variables (or random effects) involve directly sampling the latent variables along with the model parameters. In high-level software code for model definitions (using, e.g., BUGS, JAGS, Stan),…

We consider a PAC-Bayes type learning rule for binary classification, balancing the training error of a randomized ''posterior'' predictor with its KL divergence to a pre-specified ''prior''. This can be seen as an extension of a modified…

Some statistical models are specified via a data generating process for which the likelihood function cannot be computed in closed form. Standard likelihood-based inference is then not feasible but the model parameters can be inferred by…

Bayesian models often involve a small set of hyperparameters determined by maximizing the marginal likelihood. Bayesian optimization is a popular iterative method where a Gaussian process posterior of the underlying function is sequentially…

Generalising well in supervised learning tasks relies on correctly extrapolating the training data to a large region of the input space. One way to achieve this is to constrain the predictions to be invariant to transformations on the input…

This article applies the principle of Occam's Razor to non-parametric model building of statistical data, by finding a model with the minimal number of bits, leading to an exceptionally effective regularization method for probability…

Being able to reliably assess not only the \emph{accuracy} but also the \emph{uncertainty} of models' predictions is an important endeavour in modern machine learning. Even if the model generating the data and labels is known, computing the…

For nearly any challenging scientific problem evaluation of the likelihood is problematic if not impossible. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) allows us to employ the whole Bayesian formalism to problems where we can use simulations…

Recent advances in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) extend the scope of Bayesian inference to models for which the likelihood function is intractable. Although these developments allow us to estimate model parameters, other basic problems…