Related papers: Variational Bayes Made Easy

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a family of computational techniques in Bayesian statistics. These techniques allow to fi t a model to data without relying on the computation of the model likelihood. They instead require to…

The derivation of key equations for the variational Bayes approach is well-known in certain circles. However, translating the fundamental derivations (e.g., as found in Beal's work) to Friston's notation is somewhat delicate. Further, the…

We propose a black-box variational inference method to approximate intractable distributions with an increasingly rich approximating class. Our method, termed variational boosting, iteratively refines an existing variational approximation…

In just three years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as one of the most popular approaches to unsupervised learning of complicated distributions. VAEs are appealing because they are built on top of standard function…

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian approach to detect changes in the variance of a Gaussian sequence model, focusing on quantifying the uncertainty in the change point locations and providing a scalable algorithm for inference. Such a…

Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…

When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…

We introduce a new method for learning Bayesian neural networks, treating them as a stack of multivariate Bayesian linear regression models. The main idea is to infer the layerwise posterior exactly if we know the target outputs of each…

We study methods for simultaneous analysis of many noisy and biased estimates, each paired with an even noisier estimate of its own bias. The analyst's goal is to construct short calibrated intervals for each parameter. The standard…

We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…

Empirical Bayes methods have been around for a long time and have a wide range of applications. These methods provide a way in which historical data can be aggregated to provide estimates of the posterior mean. This thesis revisits some of…

We propose a novel variational Bayes approach to estimate high-dimensional vector autoregression (VAR) models with hierarchical shrinkage priors. Our approach does not rely on a conventional structural VAR representation of the parameter…

A common method for assessing validity of Bayesian sampling or approximate inference methods makes use of simulated data replicates for parameters drawn from the prior. Under continuity assumptions, quantiles of functions of the simulated…

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods perform inference on model-specific parameters of mechanistically motivated parametric statistical models when evaluating likelihoods is difficult. Central to the success of ABC methods is…

Dynamic factor models are often estimated by point-estimation methods, disregarding parameter uncertainty. We propose a method accounting for parameter uncertainty by means of posterior approximation, using variational inference. Our…

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

We consider a prior for nonparametric Bayesian estimation which uses finite random series with a random number of terms. The prior is constructed through distributions on the number of basis functions and the associated coefficients. We…

In this paper, we study porous media flows in heterogeneous stochastic media. We propose an efficient forward simulation technique that is tailored for variational Bayesian inversion. As a starting point, the proposed forward simulation…

Bayesian statistics is concerned with conducting posterior inference for the unknown quantities in a given statistical model. Conventional Bayesian inference requires the specification of a probabilistic model for the observed data, and the…

Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been…