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While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive datasets is often challenging, when possible at all. Indeed, the classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-04-23 Pierre Alquier , James Ridgway

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

Approximate inference in high-dimensional, discrete probabilistic models is a central problem in computational statistics and machine learning. This paper describes discrete particle variational inference (DPVI), a new approach that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-08 Ardavan Saeedi , Tejas D Kulkarni , Vikash Mansinghka , Samuel Gershman

Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ankush Ganguly , Samuel W. F. Earp

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

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) with Gaussian mixture families offers a flexible approach for approximating complex posterior distributions without requiring gradients of the target density. However, standard numerical optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Baojun Che , Yifan Chen , Daniel Zhengyu Huang , Xinying Mao , Weijie Wang

One of the core problems in variational inference is a choice of approximate posterior distribution. It is crucial to trade-off between efficient inference with simple families as mean-field models and accuracy of inference. We propose a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Evgenii Egorov , Kirill Neklydov , Ruslan Kostoev , Evgeny Burnaev

Envelope models provide a sufficient dimension reduction framework for multivariate regression analysis. Bayesian inference for these models has been developed primarily using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Specifically, Gibbs…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-07-10 Michael A. Chappell , Mark W. Woolrich

Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Farzaneh Mahdisoltani

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

The tree-structured stick-breaking process (TS-SBP) mixture model is a non-parametric Bayesian model that can represent tree-like hierarchical structures among the mixture components. For TS-SBP mixture models, only a Markov chain Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-12 Yuta Nakahara

Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Cheng Zhang , Judith Butepage , Hedvig Kjellstrom , Stephan Mandt

We develop a new Bayesian modelling framework for the class of higher-order, variable-memory Markov chains, and introduce an associated collection of methodological tools for exact inference with discrete time series. We show that a version…

Finite mixtures are a broad class of models useful in scenarios where observed data is generated by multiple distinct processes but without explicit information about the responsible process for each data point. Estimating Bayesian mixture…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-17 Šimon Kucharský , Paul Christian Bürkner

In this work, we propose a method for tracking multiple extended targets or unresolvable group targets in a clutter environment. Firstly, based on the Random Matrix Model (RMM), the joint state of the target is modeled as the Gamma Gaussian…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-16 Yuanhao Cheng , Yunhe Cao , Tat-Soon Yeo , Yulin Zhang , Jie Fu

Weight space symmetries in neural network architectures, such as permutation symmetries in MLPs, give rise to Bayesian neural network (BNN) posteriors with many equivalent modes. This multimodality poses a challenge for variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Yoav Gelberg , Tycho F. A. van der Ouderaa , Mark van der Wilk , Yarin Gal

Variational Bayes methods approximate the posterior density by a family of tractable distributions whose parameters are estimated by optimisation. Variational approximation is useful when exact inference is intractable or very costly. Our…

Computation · Statistics 2023-08-15 David Gunawan , Robert Kohn , David Nott

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is introduced to expand the commonly used analytic variational distribution family, by mixing the variational parameter with a flexible distribution. This mixing distribution can assume any density…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-30 Mingzhang Yin , Mingyuan Zhou

The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-02 Sefan Hörtling , Daniel Dold , Oliver Dürr , Beate Sick