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Bayesian inference involves two main computational challenges. First, in estimating the parameters of some model for the data, the posterior distribution may well be highly multi-modal: a regime in which the convergence to stationarity of…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-12-10 F. Feroz , M. P. Hobson , E. Cameron , A. N. Pettitt

Despite its long history, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and variational training remain underused in practice: standard Gaussian posteriors misalign with network geometry, KL terms can be brittle in high dimensions, and implementations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Carlos Stein Brito

We investigate the stability of a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method applied to the problem of sampling from a target distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ for large $d$. It is well known that using a single importance sampling step one produces…

Computation · Statistics 2012-04-19 Alexandros Beskos , Dan Crisan , Ajay Jasra

In scenarios with limited available data, training the function-to-function neural PDE solver in an unsupervised manner is essential. However, the efficiency and accuracy of existing methods are constrained by the properties of numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Rui Zhang , Qi Meng , Rongchan Zhu , Yue Wang , Wenlei Shi , Shihua Zhang , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Paul Fearnhead , Sebastiano Grazzi , Chris Nemeth , Gareth O. Roberts

Following [Diggle 2011, Greenland 1995], we give a simple formula for the Bayesian posterior density of a prevalence parameter based on unreliable testing of a population. This problem is of particular importance when the false positive…

Applications · Statistics 2020-09-14 Jonathan Baxter

This paper introduces a Bayesian framework that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, dimensionality reduction, and neural density estimation to efficiently handle inverse problems that (i) must be solved multiple times, and…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Giacomo Bottacini , Matteo Torzoni , Andrea Manzoni

Bayesian inference was once a gold standard for learning with neural networks, providing accurate full predictive distributions and well calibrated uncertainty. However, scaling Bayesian inference techniques to deep neural networks is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-18 Pavel Izmailov , Wesley J. Maddox , Polina Kirichenko , Timur Garipov , Dmitry Vetrov , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Variational inference has been widely used in machine learning literature to fit various Bayesian models. In network analysis, this method has been successfully applied to solve the community detection problems. Although these results are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-22 Xuezhen Li , Can M. Le

In the following article we provide an exposition of exact computational methods to perform parameter inference from partially observed network models. In particular, we consider the duplication attachment (DA) model which has a likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2013-06-20 Junshan Wang , Ajay Jasra , Maria De Iorio

We present asymptotic results for the regression-adjusted version of approximate Bayesian computation introduced by Beaumont(2002). We show that for an appropriate choice of the bandwidth, regression adjustment will lead to a posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-11-29 Wentao Li , Paul Fearnhead

Frequentist and likelihood methods of inference based on the multivariate skew-normal model encounter several technical difficulties with this model. In spite of the popularity of this class of densities, there are no broadly satisfactory…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-02-06 Brunero Liseo , Antonio Parisi

This article introduces a Bayesian neural network estimation method for quantile regression assuming an asymmetric Laplace distribution (ALD) for the response variable. It is shown that the posterior distribution for feedforward neural…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-04-06 Sanket R. Jantre , Shrijita Bhattacharya , Tapabrata Maiti

Sparsity has become a key concept for solving of high-dimensional inverse problems using variational regularization techniques. Recently, using similar sparsity-constraints in the Bayesian framework for inverse problems by encoding them in…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2014-11-18 Felix Lucka

Quantifying uncertainty in word embeddings is crucial for reliable inference from textual data. However, existing Bayesian methods such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and mean-field variational inference (MFVI) are either computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Väinö Yrjänäinen , Isac Boström , Måns Magnusson , Johan Jonasson

Variational methods that rely on a recognition network to approximate the posterior of directed graphical models offer better inference and learning than previous methods. Recent advances that exploit the capacity and flexibility in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 R Devon Hjelm , Kyunghyun Cho , Junyoung Chung , Russ Salakhutdinov , Vince Calhoun , Nebojsa Jojic

Posterior computation for high-dimensional data with many parameters can be challenging. This article focuses on a new method for approximating posterior distributions of a low- to moderate-dimensional parameter in the presence of a…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-08 Willem van den Boom , Galen Reeves , David B. Dunson

Outliers can seriously distort statistical inference by inducing excessive sensitivity in the likelihood function, thereby compromising the reliability of Bayesian estimation. To address this issue, we develop a robust Bayesian estimation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Jeongho Lee , Junmo Song

Neural networks are known to develop latent representations that are $aligned$, namely structurally similar across networks trained with different architectures, training protocols, or training datasets. We study this phenomenon in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-27 Ali Hussaini Umar , Alessandro Laio

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-04 Willem van den Boom , Andrea Cremaschi , Alexandre H. Thiery