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Related papers: Mean field approximations via log-concavity

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Bayesian inference requires approximation methods to become computable, but for most of them it is impossible to quantify how close the approximation is to the true posterior. In this work, we present a theorem upper-bounding the KL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-27 Guillaume P. Dehaene

We consider the problem of estimating small ball probabilities $\mathbb P\{f(G) \leqslant \delta \mathbb Ef(G)\}$ for sub-additive,positively homogeneous functions $f$ with respect to the Gaussian measure. We establish estimates that depend…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2021-07-29 Grigoris Paouris , Konstantin Tikhomirov , Petros Valettas

We present a new approach for inference about a log-concave distribution: Instead of using the method of maximum likelihood, we propose to incorporate the log-concavity constraint in an appropriate nonparametric confidence set for the cdf…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-05-10 Guenther Walther , Alnur Ali , Xinyue Shen , Stephen Boyd

We develop a new framework for establishing approximate factorization of entropy on arbitrary probability spaces, using a geometric notion known as non-negative sectional curvature. The resulting estimates are equivalent to entropy…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-07-29 Pietro Caputo , Justin Salez

We derive a framework to compute optimal controls for problems with states in the space of probability measures. Since many optimal control problems constrained by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE) modelling interacting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-23 Martin Burger , René Pinnau , Claudia Totzeck , Oliver Tse

The Gibbs sampler (a.k.a. Glauber dynamics and heat-bath algorithm) is a popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm which iteratively samples from the conditional distributions of a probability measure $\pi$ of interest. Under the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Filippo Ascolani , Hugo Lavenant , Giacomo Zanella

A novel computational approach to log-concave density estimation is proposed. Previous approaches utilize the piecewise-affine parametrization of the density induced by the given sample set. The number of parameters as well as non-smooth…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-21 Fabian Rathke , Christoph Schnörr

This work considers the computation of risk measures for quantities of interest governed by PDEs with Gaussian random field parameters using Taylor approximations. While efficient, Taylor approximations are local to the point of expansion,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-08-14 Dingcheng Luo , Joshua Chen , Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

This paper addresses congested transport, which can be described, at macroscopic scales, by a continuity equation with a pressure variable generated from the hard-congestion constraint (maximum value of the density). The main goal of the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-05-27 Inwon Kim , Antoine Mellet , Jeremy Sheung-Him Wu

We show under general assumptions that the mean-field approximation for quan- tum many-boson systems is correct. Our contribution unifies and improves on most of the known results. The proof uses general properties of quantization in…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2017-01-11 Quentin Liard

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-17 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We propose an algorithm to sample from composite log-concave distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$, i.e., densities of the form $\pi\propto e^{-f-g}$, assuming access to gradient evaluations of $f$ and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Linghai Liu , Sinho Chewi

Estimation of the mean vector and covariance matrix is of central importance in the analysis of multivariate data. In the framework of generalized linear models, usually the variances are certain functions of the means with the normal…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-25 Anupam Kundu , Mohsen Pourahmadi

The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional on the Wasserstein space over $\mathbb{R}^d$, and has gained attention recently as a model for the gradient descent dynamics of interacting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Anming Gu , Juno Kim

Spaces of convex and concave functions appear naturally in theory and applications. For example, convex regression and log-concave density estimation are important topics in nonparametric statistics. In stochastic portfolio theory, concave…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-05-25 Peter Baxendale , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

The probability density function (PDF) associated with a given set of samples is approximated by a piecewise-linear polynomial constructed with respect to a binning of the sample space. The kernel functions are a compactly supported basis…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-04 Giacomo Capodaglio , Max Gunzburger

We study the proximal sampler of Lee, Shen, and Tian (2021) and obtain new convergence guarantees under weaker assumptions than strong log-concavity: namely, our results hold for (1) weakly log-concave targets, and (2) targets satisfying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Yongxin Chen , Sinho Chewi , Adil Salim , Andre Wibisono

In this paper, we study two problems: (1) estimation of a $d$-dimensional log-concave distribution and (2) bounded multivariate convex regression with random design with an underlying log-concave density or a compactly supported…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-02-21 Gil Kur , Yuval Dagan , Alexander Rakhlin

Continuous-time Bayesian networks is a natural structured representation language for multicomponent stochastic processes that evolve continuously over time. Despite the compact representation, inference in such models is intractable even…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Ido Cohn , Tal El-Hay , Nir Friedman , Raz Kupferman

We consider first-order conservative systems of particles with binary Coulomb interactions in the mean-field scaling regime in dimensions $d\geq 3$. We show that if at some time, the associated sequence of empirical measures converges in a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2020-10-21 Matthew Rosenzweig