Related papers: PAVI: Plate-Amortized Variational Inference
Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…
Bayesian inference methods are useful in infectious diseases modeling due to their capability to propagate uncertainty, manage sparse data, incorporate latent structures, and address high-dimensional parameter spaces. However, parameter…
Geoscientists use observed data to estimate properties of the Earth's interior. This often requires non-linear inverse problems to be solved and uncertainties to be estimated. Bayesian inference solves inverse problems under a probabilistic…
Compared to the wide array of advanced Monte Carlo methods supported by modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), PPL support for variational inference (VI) is less developed: users are typically limited to a predefined selection…
Dimension reduction algorithms aim to discover latent variables which describe underlying structures in high-dimensional data. Methods such as factor analysis and principal component analysis have the downside of not offering much…
The key to VI is the selection of a tractable density to approximate the Bayesian posterior. For large and complex models a common choice is to assume independence between multivariate blocks in a partition of the parameter space. While…
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…
Non-linear hierarchical models are commonly used in many disciplines. However, inference in the presence of non-nested effects and on large datasets is challenging and computationally burdensome. This paper provides two contributions to…
Constructing prediction sets with coverage guarantees for unobserved outcomes is a core problem in modern statistics. Methods for predictive inference have been developed for a wide range of settings, but usually only consider test data…
Bayesian inference usually requires running potentially costly inference procedures separately for every new observation. In contrast, the idea of amortized Bayesian inference is to initially invest computational cost in training an…
Lifetime data with spatial correlations are often collected for analysis in modern engineering, clinical, and medical applications. For such spatial lifetime data, statistical models usually account for the spatial dependence through…
We develop a Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI) algorithm for Bayesian Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regression with linear weight parameterizations. The model separates impact coeffcients from weighting function parameters…
Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…
Simulation-based inference (SBI) offers a flexible and general approach to performing Bayesian inference: In SBI, a neural network is trained on synthetic data simulated from a model and used to rapidly infer posterior distributions for…
Multiple imputation has become one of the standard methods in drawing inferences in many incomplete data applications. Applications of multiple imputation in relatively more complex settings, such as high-dimensional clustered data, require…
The paper introduces a generalization for known probabilistic models such as log-linear and graphical models, called here multiplicative models. These models, that express probabilities via product of parameters are shown to capture…
Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models consisting of two components: a generative model that captures a data distribution p(x) by transforming a distribution p(z) over latent space, and an inference…
Variational Inference (VI) offers a method for approximating intractable likelihoods. In neural VI, inference of approximate posteriors is commonly done using an encoder. Alternatively, encoderless VI offers a framework for learning…
We consider the problem of inference in a causal generative model where the set of available observations differs between data instances. We show how combining samples drawn from the graphical model with an appropriate masking function…
The analysis of data from multiple experiments, such as observations of several individuals, is commonly approached using mixed-effects models, which account for variation between individuals through hierarchical representations. This makes…