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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…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a popular algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, but the vanilla TD can substantially suffer from the inherent optimization variance. A variance reduced TD (VRTD) algorithm was…

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

We develop a computationally efficient framework for quasi-Bayesian inference based on linear moment conditions. The approach employs a delayed acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo (DA-MCMC) algorithm that uses a surrogate target kernel and…

Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…

Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…

In Bayesian statistics, the choice of the prior can have an important influence on the posterior and the parameter estimation, especially when few data samples are available. To limit the added subjectivity from a priori information, one…

Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…

It is widely known that the performance of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can degrade quickly when targeting computationally expensive posterior distributions, such as when the sample size is large. This has motivated the search for MCMC…

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

Monte Carlo (MC) sampling algorithms are an extremely widely-used technique to estimate expectations of functions f(x), especially in high dimensions. Control variates are a very powerful technique to reduce the error of such estimates, but…

In high-dimensions, the prior tails can have a significant effect on both posterior computation and asymptotic concentration rates. To achieve optimal rates while keeping the posterior computations relatively simple, an empirical Bayes…

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)…

Collected data, which is used for analysis or prediction tasks, often have a hierarchical structure, for example, data from various people performing the same task. Modeling the data's structure can improve the reliability of the derived…

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

We provide the first convergence guarantee for full black-box variational inference (BBVI), also known as Monte Carlo variational inference. While preliminary investigations worked on simplified versions of BBVI (e.g., bounded domain,…

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling is computationally expensive, especially for complex models. Alternative methods make simplifying assumptions about the posterior to reduce computational burden, but their impact on predictive…