Related papers: Forward $\chi^2$ Divergence Based Variational Impo…
Understanding systems by forward and inverse modeling is a recurrent topic of research in many domains of science and engineering. In this context, Monte Carlo methods have been widely used as powerful tools for numerical inference and…
Bayesian (deep) neural networks (BNN) are often more attractive than the vanilla point-estimate deep learning in various aspects including uncertainty quantification, robustness to noise, resistance to overfitting, and more. The variational…
We propose stepwise variational inference (VI) with vine copulas: a universal VI procedure that combines vine copulas with a novel stepwise estimation procedure of the variational parameters. Vine copulas consist of a nested sequence of…
Recent work in variational inference (VI) uses ideas from Monte Carlo estimation to tighten the lower bounds on the log-likelihood that are used as objectives. However, there is no systematic understanding of how optimizing different…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…
Importance sampling (IS) is a widely used simulation method for estimating rare event probabilities. In IS, the relative variance of an estimator is the most common measure of estimator accuracy, and the focus of existing literature is on…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
We develop flexible methods of deriving variational inference for models with complex latent variable structure. By splitting the variables in these models into "global" parameters and "local" latent variables, we define a class of…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
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…
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…
Estimating the expectations of functionals applied to sums of random variables (RVs) is a well-known problem encountered in many challenging applications. Generally, closed-form expressions of these quantities are out of reach. A naive…
In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…
In few-shot learning, typically, the loss function which is applied at test time is the one we are ultimately interested in minimising, such as the mean-squared-error loss for a regression problem. However, given that we have few samples at…
High-dimensional count data poses significant challenges for statistical analysis, necessitating effective methods that also preserve explainability. We focus on a low rank constrained variant of the Poisson log-normal model, which relates…
Random feature latent variable models (RFLVMs) represent the state-of-the-art in latent variable models, capable of handling non-Gaussian likelihoods and effectively uncovering patterns in high-dimensional data. However, their heavy…
We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…
Variable selection plays a fundamental role in high-dimensional data analysis. Various methods have been developed for variable selection in recent years. Well-known examples are forward stepwise regression (FSR) and least angle regression…
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…
In practical regression applications, multiple covariates are often measured, but not all may be associated with the response variable. Identifying and including only the relevant covariates in the model is crucial for improving prediction…