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When prior information is lacking, the go-to strategy for probabilistic inference is to combine a "default prior" and the likelihood via Bayes's theorem. Objective Bayes, (generalized) fiducial inference, etc. fall under this umbrella. This…

Bayesian methods are appealing in their flexibility in modeling complex data and ability in capturing uncertainty in parameters. However, when Bayes' rule does not result in tractable closed-form, most approximate inference algorithms lack…

Solving Bayesian inverse problems typically involves deriving a posterior distribution using Bayes' rule, followed by sampling from this posterior for analysis. Sampling methods, such as general-purpose Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), are…

This paper describes how to specify probability models for data analysis via a backward induction procedure. The new approach yields coherent, prior-free uncertainty assessment. After presenting some intuition-building examples, the new…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the main workhorses of probabilistic inference, but it is notoriously hard to measure the quality of approximate posterior samples. This challenge is particularly salient in black box inference…

Berger et al. (2001) and Ren et al. (2012) derived noninformative priors for Gaussian process models of spatially correlated data using the reference prior approach (Berger, Bernardo, 1991). The priors have good statistical properties and…

Diffusion models enable the synthesis of highly accurate samples from complex distributions and have become foundational in generative modeling. Recently, they have demonstrated significant potential for solving Bayesian inverse problems by…

A plethora of problems in AI, engineering and the sciences are naturally formalized as inference in discrete probabilistic models. Exact inference is often prohibitively expensive, as it may require evaluating the (unnormalized) target…

Probabilistic programming is the idea of writing models from statistics and machine learning using program notations and reasoning about these models using generic inference engines. Recently its combination with deep learning has been…

We advocate for a new statistical principle that combines the most desirable aspects of both parameter inference and density estimation. This leads us to the predictively oriented (PrO) posterior, which expresses uncertainty as a…

The Python package pyABC provides a framework for approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), a likelihood-free parameter inference method popular in many research areas. At its core, it implements a sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) scheme, with…

Bayesian analysis often concerns an evaluation of models with different dimensionality as is necessary in, for example, model selection or mixture models. To facilitate this evaluation, transdimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and…

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.…

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…

Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…

Sampling from the posterior is a key technical problem in Bayesian statistics. Rigorous guarantees are difficult to obtain for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms of common use. In this paper, we study an alternative class of algorithms…

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

A common strategy for inference in complex models is the relaxation of a simple model into the more complex target model, for example the prior into the posterior in Bayesian inference. Existing approaches that attempt to generate such…

In many domains, we are interested in analyzing the structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether one variable is a direct parent of the other. Bayesian model-selection attempts to find the MAP model and use its structure to…