English
Related papers

Related papers: A Tutorial on Parametric Variational Inference

200 papers

Models with a large number of latent variables are often used to fully utilize the information in big or complex data. However, they can be difficult to estimate using standard approaches, and variational inference methods are a popular…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-04-20 Rubén Loaiza-Maya , Michael Stanley Smith , David J. Nott , Peter J. Danaher

Bayesian inference requires specification of a single, precise prior distribution, whereas frequentist inference only accommodates a vacuous prior. Since virtually every real-world application falls somewhere in between these two extremes,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-26 Ryan Martin

Expanding a lower-dimensional problem to a higher-dimensional space and then projecting back is often beneficial. This article rigorously investigates this perspective in the context of finite mixture models, namely how to improve inference…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-11-10 Andrea Mercatanti , Fan Li , Fabrizia Mealli

Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-29 Blake Hansen , Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco , Massimiliano Russo , Roberta De Vito

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried

Stability selection is a versatile framework for structure estimation and variable selection in high-dimensional setting, primarily grounded in frequentist principles. In this paper, we propose an enhanced methodology that integrates…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-05 Mahdi Nouraie , Connor Smith , Samuel Muller

The core principle of Variational Inference (VI) is to convert the statistical inference problem of computing complex posterior probability densities into a tractable optimization problem. This property enables VI to be faster than several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Ankush Ganguly , Sanjana Jain , Ukrit Watchareeruetai

Bayesian optimization is a methodology for global optimization of unknown and expensive objectives. It combines a surrogate Bayesian regression model with an acquisition function to decide where to evaluate the objective. Typical regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Afonso Eduardo , Michael U. Gutmann

The key distinguishing property of a Bayesian approach is marginalization instead of optimization, not the prior, or Bayes rule. Bayesian inference is especially compelling for deep neural networks. (1) Neural networks are typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-30 Andrew Gordon Wilson

Variational inference techniques based on inducing variables provide an elegant framework for scalable posterior estimation in Gaussian process (GP) models. Besides enabling scalability, one of their main advantages over sparse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-24 Simone Rossi , Markus Heinonen , Edwin V. Bonilla , Zheyang Shen , Maurizio Filippone

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

Projection predictive inference is a decision theoretic Bayesian approach that decouples model estimation from decision making. Given a reference model previously built including all variables present in the data, projection predictive…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-10-15 Alejandro Catalina , Paul-Christian Bürkner , Aki Vehtari

In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of line spectral estimation in a Bayesian framework. We target model order and parameter estimation via variational inference in a probabilistic model in which the frequencies are…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-04-05 Mihai-Alin Badiu , Thomas Lundgaard Hansen , Bernard Henri Fleury

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

Over-parameterized models, such as DeepNets and ConvNets, form a class of models that are routinely adopted in a wide variety of applications, and for which Bayesian inference is desirable but extremely challenging. Variational inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-24 Simone Rossi , Sebastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…

Geophysics · Physics 2024-01-01 Xuebin Zhao , Andrew Curtis

Variable selection is a classic problem in statistics. In this paper, we consider a Bayes variable selection problem based on spike-and-slab prior with mixed normal distribution proposed by Ro\v{c}kov\'a and George (2014). Motivated by…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-03-08 Lin Guoqiang

Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-10 Artem Sobolev , Dmitry Vetrov

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

Despite the dominant role of deep models in machine learning, limitations persist, including overconfident predictions, susceptibility to adversarial attacks, and underestimation of variability in predictions. The Bayesian paradigm provides…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-18 Alisa Sheinkman , Sara Wade