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As a computational alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, variational inference (VI) is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in large-scale Bayesian models due to its comparable…
Variational Inference (VI) is a method that approximates a difficult-to-compute posterior density using better behaved distributional families. VI is an alternative to the already well-studied Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method of…
The Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference scheme is a popular algorithm used to compute the mean-field approximation of a probability distribution of interest. We analyze its random scan version, under log-concavity assumptions on the…
Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. This paper studies the stability properties of the mean-field approximation when the target…
In Variational Inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability densities. In real-world implementations of complex models, Monte Carlo…
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 is a fast and scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo and has been widely applied to posterior inference tasks in statistics and machine learning. A traditional approach for implementing mean-field variational…
Heterogeneous, mixed type datasets including both continuous and categorical variables are ubiquitous, and enriches data analysis by allowing for more complex relationships and interactions to be modelled. Mixture models offer a flexible…
We propose a new approach to deriving quantitative mean field approximations for any probability measure $P$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with density proportional to $e^{f(x)}$, for $f$ strongly concave. We bound the mean field approximation for the…
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 empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…
We propose to perform mean-field variational inference (MFVI) in a rotated coordinate system that reduces correlations between variables. The rotation is determined by principal component analysis (PCA) of a cross-covariance matrix…
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…
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…
Variational inference is computationally challenging in models that contain both conjugate and non-conjugate terms. Methods specifically designed for conjugate models, even though computationally efficient, find it difficult to deal with…
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived…
We consider a class of optimization problems with Cartesian variational inequality (CVI) constraints, where the objective function is convex and the CVI is associated with a monotone mapping and a convex Cartesian product set. This…
The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…
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…