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Related papers: Variational methods for simulation-based inference

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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

The marginal likelihood, or evidence, plays a central role in Bayesian model selection, yet remains notoriously challenging to compute in likelihood-free settings. While Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) techniques such as Sequential Neural…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-14 Paul Bastide , Arnaud Estoup , Jean-Michel Marin , Julien Stoehr

Developing efficient solutions for inference problems in intelligent sensor networks is crucial for the next generation of location, tracking, and mapping services. This paper develops a scalable distributed probabilistic inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Parth Paritosh , Nikolay Atanasov , Sonia Martinez

We introduce implicit Bayesian neural networks, a simple and scalable approach for uncertainty representation in deep learning. Standard Bayesian approach to deep learning requires the impractical inference of the posterior distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Trung Trinh , Samuel Kaski , Markus Heinonen

We introduce two synthetic likelihood methods for Simulation-Based Inference (SBI), to conduct either amortized or targeted inference from experimental observations when a high-fidelity simulator is available. Both methods learn a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Pierre Glaser , Michael Arbel , Samo Hromadka , Arnaud Doucet , Arthur Gretton

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) employs stochastic optimization to scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. Since SVI is at its core a stochastic gradient-based algorithm, horizontal parallelism can be harnessed to allow larger…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-16 Saad Mohamad , Abdelhamid Bouchachia , Moamar Sayed-Mouchaweh

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide variety of tasks. However, quantifying uncertainty in the network's output is a challenging task. Bayesian models offer a mathematical framework to reason about model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Manikanta Srikar Yellapragada , Chandra Prakash Konkimalla

Comparison of appropriate models to describe observational data is a fundamental task of science. The Bayesian model evidence, or marginal likelihood, is a computationally challenging, yet crucial, quantity to estimate to perform Bayesian…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2023-11-10 A. Spurio Mancini , M. M. Docherty , M. A. Price , J. D. McEwen

Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a flexible and general approach to performing Bayesian inference: In SBI, a neural network is trained on synthetic data simulated from a model and used to rapidly infer posterior distributions for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Julius Vetter , Manuel Gloeckler , Daniel Gedon , Jakob H. Macke

We propose a novel approach to perform approximate Bayesian inference in complex models such as Bayesian neural networks. The approach is more scalable to large data than Markov Chain Monte Carlo, it embraces more expressive models than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-07 Joel Janek Dabrowski , Daniel Edward Pagendam

Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Chenyang Zhong , Sumit Mukherjee , Bodhisattva Sen

Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-17 Jincheng Bai , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-27 Lucas Kock , Scott A. Sisson , G. S. Rodrigues , David J. Nott

Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jinlin Lai , Antonio Linero , Yuling Yao

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

Bayesian neural networks offer better estimates of model uncertainty compared to frequentist networks. However, inference involving Bayesian models requires multiple instantiations or sampling of the network parameters, requiring…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Prabodh Katti , Anagha Nimbekar , Chen Li , Amit Acharyya , Bashir M. Al-Hashimi , Bipin Rajendran

Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Minta Liu , Suliang Bu

For complex simulation problems, inferring parameters often precludes the use of classical likelihood-based techniques due to intractable likelihoods. Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods offer a likelihood-free approach to directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Haley Rosso , Talea Mayo

Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Hamza Anwar , Quanyan Zhu

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is an approach to statistical inference where simulations from an assumed model are used to construct estimators and confidence sets. SBI is often used when the likelihood is intractable and to construct…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-05 Lorenzo Tomaselli , Valérie Ventura , Larry Wasserman