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One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…

Computation · Statistics 2018-05-11 David M. Blei , Alp Kucukelbir , Jon D. McAuliffe

Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular estimation method for Bayesian inference. However, most existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes their use in many important situations. Tran et…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-05-19 David Gunawan , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Robert Kohn

Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-15 Yue Yang , Ryan Martin , Howard Bondell

Bayesian inference typically relies on specifying a parametric model that approximates the data-generating process. However, misspecified models can yield poor convergence rates and unreliable posterior calibration. Bayesian empirical…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-27 Kenyon Ng , Weichang Yu , Howard D. Bondell

Inference methods are often formulated as variational approximations: these approximations allow easy evaluation of statistics by marginalization or linear response, but these estimates can be inconsistent. We show that by introducing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-27 Jack Raymond , Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

We study the convergence rates of empirical Bayes posterior distributions for nonparametric and high-dimensional inference. We show that as long as the hyperparameter set is discrete, the empirical Bayes posterior distribution induced by…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-10 Fengshuo Zhang , Chao Gao

Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-10 Ted Westling , Tyler H. McCormick

A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…

Computation · Statistics 2013-10-15 Alexis Roche

Approximate Bayesian Computation is a family of likelihood-free inference techniques that are well-suited to models defined in terms of a stochastic generating mechanism. In a nutshell, Approximate Bayesian Computation proceeds by computing…

Computation · Statistics 2010-07-28 Michael Blum

A framework is presented for fitting inverse problem models via variational Bayes approximations. This methodology guarantees flexibility to statistical model specification for a broad range of applications, good accuracy and reduced model…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-05 Luca Maestrini , Robert G. Aykroyd , Matt P. Wand

We develop a variational Bayes approach for dynamic variable selection in high-dimensional regression models with time-varying parameters and predictors that exhibit a predefined group structure. Through comprehensive simulation studies, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-16 Nicolas Bianco , Mauro Bernardi , Daniele Bianchi

Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Sébastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

A variational Bayesian inference for measured wave intensity, such as X-ray intensity, is proposed in this paper. The data is popular to obtain information about unobservable features of an object, such as a material sample and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Akinori Asahara , Yoshihiro Osakabe , Yamamoto Mitsuya , Hidekazu Morita

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

Although Bayesian methods are robust and principled, their application in practice could be limited since they typically rely on computationally intensive Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms for their implementation. One possible solution…

Computation · Statistics 2015-10-06 Tian Chen , Jeffrey Streets , Babak Shahbaba

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

The article describe the model, derivation, and implementation of variational Bayesian inference for linear and logistic regression, both with and without automatic relevance determination. It has the dual function of acting as a tutorial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-18 Jan Drugowitsch

Bayesian methods are useful for statistical inference. However, real-world problems can be challenging using Bayesian methods when the data analyst has only limited prior knowledge. In this paper we consider a class of problems, called…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-11-20 Yixuan Qiu , Lingsong Zhang , Chuanhai Liu