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The abundance of modern health data provides many opportunities for the use of machine learning techniques to build better statistical models to improve clinical decision making. Predicting time-to-event distributions, also known as…
Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…
In Generalised Bayesian Inference (GBI), the learning rate and hyperparameters of the loss must be estimated. These inference-hyperparameters can't be estimated jointly with the other parameters, from the data, by giving them a prior.…
While Variational Inference (VI) is central to modern generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs), its pedagogical treatment is split across disciplines. In statistics, VI is typically framed…
Probabilistic modeling is iterative. A scientist posits a simple model, fits it to her data, refines it according to her analysis, and repeats. However, fitting complex models to large data is a bottleneck in this process. Deriving…
Machine learning models often generalize poorly to out-of-distribution (OOD) data as a result of relying on features that are spuriously correlated with the label during training. Recently, the technique of Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM)…
We advocate an optimization-centric view on and introduce a novel generalization of Bayesian inference. Our inspiration is the representation of Bayes' rule as infinite-dimensional optimization problem (Csiszar, 1975; Donsker and Varadhan;…
A framework for robust optimization under uncertainty based on the use of the generalized inverse distribution function (GIDF), also called quantile function, is here proposed. Compared to more classical approaches that rely on the usage of…
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…
Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…
Stochastic planning can be reduced to probabilistic inference in large discrete graphical models, but hardness of inference requires approximation schemes to be used. In this paper we argue that such applications can be disentangled along…
Understanding variable dependence, particularly eliciting their statistical properties given a set of covariates, provides the mathematical foundation in practical operations management such as risk analysis and decision-making given…
Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…
In practice, there often exist unobserved variables, also termed hidden variables, associated with both the response and covariates. Existing works in the literature mostly focus on linear regression with hidden variables. However, when the…
We develop unbiased implicit variational inference (UIVI), a method that expands the applicability of variational inference by defining an expressive variational family. UIVI considers an implicit variational distribution obtained in a…
The steady-state Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) makes it possible to incorporate prior information about the long-run mean of the process. This has been shown in many studies to substantially improve forecasting performance, and the…
Multivariate Gaussian is often used as a first approximation to the distribution of high-dimensional data. Determining the parameters of this distribution under various constraints is a widely studied problem in statistics, and is often…
In this paper, we address the issue of model specification in probabilistic latent variable models (PLVMs) using an infinite-horizon optimal control approach. Traditional PLVMs rely on joint distributions to model complex data, but…
Given observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference searches for the distribution of the model's parameters that could have yielded the data. Inference is challenging for large population studies where millions of…
Probabilistic regression models the entire predictive distribution of a response variable, offering richer insights than classical point estimates and directly allowing for uncertainty quantification. While diffusion-based generative models…