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The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-21 Soumyadip Ghosh , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Edith Zhang

For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Kyurae Kim , Qiang Fu , Yi-An Ma , Jacob R. Gardner , Trevor Campbell

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

Most applications of Bayesian Inference for parameter estimation and model selection in astrophysics involve the use of Monte Carlo techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and nested sampling. However, these techniques are time…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-01-26 Geetakrishnasai Gunapati , Anirudh Jain , P. K. Srijith , Shantanu Desai

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

Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Yingzhi Xia , Qifeng Liao , Jinglai Li

Bayesian hierarchical linear models provide a natural framework to analyze nested and clustered data. Classical estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo produces well calibrated posterior distributions but becomes computationally expensive…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Cristian Parra-Aldana , Juan Sosa

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-20 Thomas Pinder , Christopher Nemeth , David Leslie

We develop a framework for generalized variational inference in infinite-dimensional function spaces and use it to construct a method termed Gaussian Wasserstein inference (GWI). GWI leverages the Wasserstein distance between Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Veit D. Wild , Robert Hu , Dino Sejdinovic

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-16 Martin Chak , Giacomo Zanella

Computer models play a crucial role in numerous scientific and engineering domains. To ensure the accuracy of simulations, it is essential to properly calibrate the input parameters of these models through statistical inference. While…

Applications · Statistics 2024-03-07 Dongkyu Derek Cho , Won Chang , Jaewoo Park

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Christopher Wolf , Maximilian Karl , Patrick van der Smagt

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

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-21 Justin Domke

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Kush Bhatia , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Yixin Wang

We propose a robust and scalable framework for variational Bayes (VB) that effectively handles outliers and contamination of arbitrary nature in large datasets. Our approach divides the dataset into disjoint subsets, computes the posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-18 Carlos Misael Madrid Padilla , Shitao Fan , Lizhen Lin

The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-06 Martin Magris , Alexandros Iosifidis

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-05 Reza Hajargasht

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-11 Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan , Tamer A. Zaki , Michael D. Shields