Related papers: Robust Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference wit…

This paper describes an approach to simultaneously identify clusters and estimate cluster-specific regression parameters from the given data. Such an approach can be useful in learning the relationship between input and output when the…

Accurate calibration of stochastic agent-based models (ABMs) in epidemiology is crucial to make them useful in public health policy decisions and interventions. Traditional calibration methods, e.g., Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), that…

Balancing computational efficiency with robust predictive performance is crucial in supervised learning, especially for critical applications. Standard deep learning models, while accurate and scalable, often lack probabilistic features…

We propose stepwise variational inference (VI) with vine copulas: a universal VI procedure that combines vine copulas with a novel stepwise estimation procedure of the variational parameters. Vine copulas consist of a nested sequence of…

We introduce Group Spike-and-slab Variational Bayes (GSVB), a scalable method for group sparse regression. A fast co-ordinate ascent variational inference (CAVI) algorithm is developed for several common model families including Gaussian,…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Laplace approximation (LA) and variational inference (VI) methods are popular approaches to Bayesian inference, each with trade-offs between computational cost and accuracy. However, a theoretical…

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a powerful and accurate method to sample from the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. However, HMC techniques are computationally demanding for Bayesian neural networks due to the high…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

Dimension reduction algorithms aim to discover latent variables which describe underlying structures in high-dimensional data. Methods such as factor analysis and principal component analysis have the downside of not offering much…

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a powerful methodology for the approximation of posterior distributions. However, the iterative nature of MCMC does not naturally facilitate its use with modern highly parallel computation on HPC and cloud…

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is a widely recognised as an efficient method for sampling a specified posterior distribution. However, when the posterior is multi-modal, conventional MCMC algorithms either tend to become…

This is a course project report with complete methodology, experiments, references and mathematical derivations. Matrix factorization [1] is a widely used technique in recommendation systems. Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (PMF) [2]…

Importance sampling (IS) is commonly used for cross validation (CV) in Bayesian models, because it only involves reweighting existing posterior draws without needing to re-estimate the model by re-running Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC).…

Sampling and Variational Inference (VI) are two large families of methods for approximate inference that have complementary strengths. Sampling methods excel at approximating arbitrary probability distributions, but can be inefficient. VI…

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,…

Large spatial datasets with non-Gaussian responses are increasingly common in environmental monitoring, ecology, and remote sensing, yet scalable Bayesian inference for such data remains challenging. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods…

Boosting variational inference (BVI) approximates an intractable probability density by iteratively building up a mixture of simple component distributions one at a time, using techniques from sparse convex optimization to provide both…

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

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…