Related papers: Variational methods for simulation-based inference
Estimating the parameters of mathematical models is a common problem in almost all branches of science. However, this problem can prove notably difficult when processes and model descriptions become increasingly complex and an explicit…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
Stochastic Natural Gradient Variational Inference (NGVI) is a widely used method for approximating posterior distribution in probabilistic models. Despite its empirical success and foundational role in variational inference, its theoretical…
A new variational inference method, SPH-ParVI, based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), is proposed for sampling partially known densities (e.g. up to a constant) or sampling using gradients. SPH-ParVI simulates the flow of a fluid…
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…
Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…
Bayesian neural networks (BNN) can estimate the uncertainty in predictions, as opposed to non-Bayesian neural networks (NNs). However, BNNs have been far less widely used than non-Bayesian NNs in practice since they need iterative NN…
Neural networks are being extensively used for modelling data, especially in the case where no likelihood can be formulated. Although in the case of X-ray spectral fitting, the likelihood is known, we aim to investigate the neural networks…
This paper presents a novel framework for full-waveform seismic source inversion using simulation-based inference (SBI). Traditional probabilistic approaches often rely on simplifying assumptions about data errors, which we show can lead to…
While Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold the promise of being flexible, well-calibrated statistical models, inference often requires approximations whose consequences are poorly understood. We study the quality of common variational…
Highly expressive directed latent variable models, such as sigmoid belief networks, are difficult to train on large datasets because exact inference in them is intractable and none of the approximate inference methods that have been applied…
In this paper we propose BVAR-connect, a variational inference approach to a Bayesian multi-subject vector autoregressive (VAR) model for inference on effective brain connectivity based on resting-state functional MRI data. The modeling…
Sensitivity analyses reveal the influence of various modeling choices on the outcomes of statistical analyses. While theoretically appealing, they are overwhelmingly inefficient for complex Bayesian models. In this work, we propose…
Symbolic regression discovers explicit, interpretable equations without assuming a functional form in advance. A Bayesian approach strengthens this through probability distributions over candidate expressions, thus quantifying uncertainty…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) is a method to perform inference on a variety of complex scientific models with challenging inference (inverse) problems. Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED) aims to efficiently use experimental…
Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a formalism to quantify and calibrate uncertainty in deep learning. Current inference approaches for BNNs often resort to few-sample estimation for scalability, which can harm predictive performance,…
Posterior inference in directed graphical models is commonly done using a probabilistic encoder (a.k.a inference model) conditioned on the input. Often this inference model is trained jointly with the probabilistic decoder (a.k.a generator…
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…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…