English
Related papers

Related papers: An introduction to variational inference in Geophy…

200 papers

Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…

Ising models originated in statistical physics and are widely used in modeling spatial data and computer vision problems. However, statistical inference of this model remains challenging due to intractable nature of the normalizing constant…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-06 Minwoo Kim , Shrijita Bhattacharya , Tapabrata Maiti

Structured variational inference constitutes a core methodology in modern statistical applications. Unlike mean-field variational inference, the approximate posterior is assumed to have interdependent structure. We consider the natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Shunan Sheng , Bohan Wu , Bennett Zhu , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Didrik Nielsen

We propose a Bayesian inference framework to estimate uncertainties in inverse scattering problems. Given the observed data, the forward model and their uncertainties, we find the posterior distribution over a finite parameter field…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-11-17 Ana Carpio , Sergei Iakunin , Georg Stadler

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Shitao Fan , Ilsang Ohn , David Dunson , Lizhen Lin

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)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

The present paper proposes a Bayesian framework for inverse problems that seamlessly integrates optimization and inversion to enable rapid surrogate modeling, accurate parameter inference, and rigorous uncertainty quantification. Bayesian…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Mihaela Chiappetta , Massimo Carraturo , Alexander Raßloff , Markus Kästner , Ferdinando Auricchio

Model misspecification constitutes a major obstacle to reliable inference in many inverse problems. Inverse problems in seismology, for example, are particularly affected by misspecification of wave propagation velocities. In this paper, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-05-18 Andrea Scarinci , Michael Fehler , Youssef Marzouk

This study investigates the variational posterior convergence rates of inverse problems for partial differential equations (PDEs) with parameters in Besov spaces $B_{pp}^\alpha$ ($p \geq 1$) which are modeled naturally in a Bayesian manner…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shaokang Zu , Junxiong Jia , Zhiguo Wang

We introduce a level set based approach to Bayesian geometric inverse problems. In these problems the interface between different domains is the key unknown, and is realized as the level set of a function. This function itself becomes the…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-02 Marco A. Iglesias , Yulong Lu , Andrew M. Stuart

In recent years, the field of machine learning has made phenomenal progress in the pursuit of simulating real-world data generation processes. One notable example of such success is the variational autoencoder (VAE). In this work, with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-30 Hwan Goh , Sheroze Sheriffdeen , Jonathan Wittmer , Tan Bui-Thanh

One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 David M. Blei , Alp Kucukelbir , Jon D. McAuliffe

The determination of Parton Distribution Functions from a finite set of data is a typical example of an inverse problem. Inverse problems are notoriously difficult to solve, in particular when a robust determination of the uncertainty in…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2023-03-01 Alessandro Candido , Luigi Del Debbio , Tommaso Giani , Giacomo Petrillo

Variational inference provides approximations to the computationally intractable posterior distribution in Bayesian networks. A prominent medical application of noisy-or Bayesian network is to infer potential diseases given observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-23 Yusheng Xie , Nan Du , Wei Fan , Jing Zhai , Weicheng Zhu

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

We adopt Bayesian approach to consider the inverse problem of estimate a function from noisy observations. One important component of this approach is the prior measure. Total variation prior has been proved with no discretization invariant…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Jigen Peng , Jinghuai Gao

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-17 Jean Daunizeau

Bayesian inference is a popular approach to calibrating uncertainties, but it can underpredict such uncertainties when model misspecification is present, impacting its reliability to inform decision making. Recently, the statistics and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Rebekah White , Rileigh Bandy , Teresa Portone

The Bayesian inversion method demonstrates significant potential for solving inverse problems, enabling both point estimation and uncertainty quantification (UQ). However, Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation may become unstable…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-04 Ruibiao Song , Liying Zhang