Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy on Lie Groups: Theory and…
We establish optimal convergence rates for a decomposition-based scalable approach to kernel ridge regression. The method is simple to describe: it randomly partitions a dataset of size N into m subsets of equal size, computes an…
We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…
This paper reviews advances in Stein-type shrinkage estimation for spherically symmetric distributions. Some emphasis is placed on developing intuition as to why shrinkage should work in location problems whether the underlying population…
Recently, a Distribution Separation Method (DSM) is proposed for relevant feedback in information retrieval, which aims to approximate the true relevance distribution by separating a seed irrelevance distribution from the mixture one. While…
We develop a variant of Stein's method of comparison of generators to bound the Kolmogorov, total variation, and Wasserstein-1 distances between distributions on the real line. Our discrepancy is expressed in terms of the ratio of reverse…
Stein operators are differential operators which arise within the so-called Stein's method for stochastic approximation. We propose a new mechanism for constructing such operators for arbitrary (continuous or discrete) parametric…
Kernel density estimation (KDE) is integral to a range of generative and discriminative tasks in machine learning. Drawing upon tools from the multidimensional calculus of variations, we derive an optimal weight function that reduces bias…
In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…
For two decades, reproducing kernels and their associated discrepancies have facilitated elegant theoretical analyses in the setting of quasi Monte Carlo. These same tools are now receiving interest in statistics and related fields, as…
We provide a general result for finding Stein operators for the product of two independent random variables whose Stein operators satisfy a certain assumption, extending a recent result of Gaunt, Mijoule and Swan \cite{gms18}. This…
An important task in computational statistics and machine learning is to approximate a posterior distribution $p(x)$ with an empirical measure supported on a set of representative points $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^n$. This paper focuses on methods…
We build upon recent advances on the distributional aspect of Stein's method to propose a novel and flexible technique for computing Stein operators for random variables that can be written as products of independent random variables. We…
We introduce kernel density machines (KDM), an agnostic kernel-based framework for learning the Radon-Nikodym derivative (density) between probability measures under minimal assumptions. KDM applies to general measurable spaces and avoids…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…
We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…
When a population exhibits heterogeneity, we often model it via a finite mixture: decompose it into several different but homogeneous subpopulations. Contemporary practice favors learning the mixtures by maximizing the likelihood for…
We propose a new hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations for inference problems. As test cases, we consider the problem of community detection in block models. The vertices are partitioned into $k$ communities, and a graph is…
Motivated by the omnipresence of extreme value distributions in limit theorems involving extremes of random processes, we adapt Stein's method to include these laws as possible target distributions. We do so by using the generator approach…