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Ordinal categorical data are routinely encountered in many practical applications. When the primary goal is to construct a regression model for ordinal outcomes, cumulative link models represent one of the most popular choices to link the…

This paper focuses on a class of variational inequalities (VIs), where the map defining the VI is given by the component-wise conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of a random function. We focus on solving the VI using sample average…

The expressiveness of flow-based models combined with stochastic variational inference (SVI) has expanded the application of optimization-based Bayesian inference to highly complex problems. However, despite the importance of multi-model…

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…

Discrete choice models are commonly used by applied statisticians in numerous fields, such as marketing, economics, finance, and operations research. When agents in discrete choice models are assumed to have differing preferences, exact…

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…

Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) enriches the expressiveness of variational families by utilizing a kernel and a mixing distribution to hierarchically define the variational distribution. Existing SIVI methods parameterize the…

This paper introduces the variational R\'enyi bound (VR) that extends traditional variational inference to R\'enyi's alpha-divergences. This new family of variational methods unifies a number of existing approaches, and enables a smooth…

In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…

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…

We revisit the theory of importance weighted variational inference (IWVI), a promising strategy for learning latent variable models. IWVI uses new variational bounds, known as Monte Carlo objectives (MCOs), obtained by replacing intractable…

We extend the existing framework of semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) and introduce doubly semi-implicit variational inference (DSIVI), a way to perform variational inference and learning when both the approximate posterior and the…

Cross-validation (CV) is one of the main tools for performance estimation and parameter tuning in machine learning. The general recipe for computing CV estimate is to run a learning algorithm separately for each CV fold, a computationally…

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…

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…

We demonstrate the use of a variational method to determine a quantitative lower bound on the rate of convergence of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms as a function of the target density and proposal density. The bound relies on…

The log-logistic regression model is one of the most commonly used accelerated failure time (AFT) models in survival analysis, for which statistical inference methods are mainly established under the frequentist framework. Recently,…

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

This article considers Bayesian model selection via mean-field (MF) variational approximation. Towards this goal, we study the non-asymptotic properties of MF inference under the Bayesian framework that allows latent variables and model…