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PAC-Bayes is a popular and efficient framework for obtaining generalization guarantees in situations involving uncountable hypothesis spaces. Unfortunately, in its classical formulation, it only provides guarantees on the expected risk of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Benjamin Leblanc , Pascal Germain

Inference for the parameters indexing generalised linear models is routinely based on the assumption that the model is correct and a priori specified. This is unsatisfactory because the chosen model is usually the result of a data-adaptive…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-06-16 Stijn Vansteelandt , Oliver Dukes

We propose a new model selection method, the posterior averaging information criterion, for Bayesian model assessment from a predictive perspective. The theoretical foundation is built on the Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify the…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-22 Shouhao Zhou

Beta regression is commonly employed when the outcome variable is a proportion. Since its conception, the approach has been widely used in applications spanning various scientific fields. A series of extensions have been proposed over time,…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-29 Niloofar Ramezani , Martin Slawski

The current standard Bayesian approach to model calibration, which assigns a Gaussian process prior to the discrepancy term, often suffers from issues of unidentifiability and computational complexity and instability. When the goal is to…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-09-13 Spencer Woody , Novin Ghaffari , Lauren Hund

The marginal likelihood, also known as the evidence, is regarded as a mathematical embodiment of Occam's razor, enabling model selection that avoids overfitting. The evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective from variational inference has also…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-30 Ethan Harvey , Michael C. Hughes

We explore the family of methods "PAC-Bayes with Backprop" (PBB) to train probabilistic neural networks by minimizing PAC-Bayes bounds. We present two training objectives, one derived from a previously known PAC-Bayes bound, and a second…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-07 Omar Rivasplata , Vikram M Tankasali , Csaba Szepesvari

The focal loss has demonstrated its effectiveness in many real-world applications such as object detection and image classification, but its theoretical understanding has been limited so far. In this paper, we first prove that the focal…

When I first encountered PAC-Bayesian concentration inequalities they seemed to me to be rather disconnected from good old-fashioned results like Hoeffding's and Bernstein's inequalities. But, at least for one flavour of the PAC-Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-05-08 Tim van Erven

When utilising PAC-Bayes theory for risk certification, it is usually necessary to estimate and bound the Gibbs risk of the PAC-Bayes posterior. Many works in the literature employ a method for this which requires a large number of passes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Felix Biggs

Current approaches in approximate inference for Bayesian neural networks minimise the Kullback-Leibler divergence to approximate the true posterior over the weights. However, this approximation is without knowledge of the final application,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-11 Adam D. Cobb , Stephen J. Roberts , Yarin Gal

Inductive Conformal Prediction (ICP) provides a practical and effective approach for equipping deep learning models with uncertainty estimates in the form of set-valued predictions which are guaranteed to contain the ground truth with high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Apoorva Sharma , Sushant Veer , Asher Hancock , Heng Yang , Marco Pavone , Anirudha Majumdar

This paper studies the truncation method from Alquier [1] to derive high-probability PAC-Bayes bounds for unbounded losses with heavy tails. Assuming that the $p$-th moment is bounded, the resulting bounds interpolate between a slow rate $1…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-26 Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Omar Rivasplata , Ragnar Thobaben , Mikael Skoglund

We offer a general Bayes theoretic framework to derive posterior contraction rates under a hierarchical prior design: the first-step prior serves to assess the model selection uncertainty, and the second-step prior quantifies the prior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-12 Qiyang Han

This paper considers a non-standard problem of generating samples from a low-temperature Gibbs distribution with \emph{constrained} support, when some of the coordinates of the mode lie on the boundary. These coordinates are referred to as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Ruixiao Wang , Xiaohong Chen , Sinho Chewi

Observational healthcare data offer the potential to estimate causal effects of medical products on a large scale. However, the confidence intervals and p-values produced by observational studies only account for random error and fail to…

Applications · Statistics 2024-05-02 Jami J. Mulgrave , David Madigan , George Hripcsak

We consider the asymptotic behavior of posterior distributions and Bayes estimators based on observations which are required to be neither independent nor identically distributed. We give general results on the rate of convergence of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Subhashis Ghosal , Aad van der Vaart

Nonparametric estimation using uniform-width binning is a standard approach for evaluating the calibration performance of machine learning models. However, existing theoretical analyses of the bias induced by binning are limited to binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Masahiro Fujisawa , Futoshi Futami

In causal inference, treatment effects are typically estimated under the ignorability, or unconfoundedness, assumption, which is often unrealistic in observational data. By relaxing this assumption and conducting a sensitivity analysis, we…

Empirically, the PAC-Bayesian analysis is known to produce tight risk bounds for practical machine learning algorithms. However, in its naive form, it can only deal with stochastic predictors while such predictors are rarely used and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-22 Kohei Miyaguchi