Related papers: The Polynomial Stein Discrepancy for Assessing Mom…
When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…
Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…
A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…
Ensembles of deep neural networks have achieved great success recently, but they do not offer a proper Bayesian justification. Moreover, while they allow for averaging of predictions over several hypotheses, they do not provide any…
We investigate properties of goodness-of-fit tests based on the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD). We introduce a strategy to construct a test, called KSDAgg, which aggregates multiple tests with different kernels. KSDAgg avoids splitting the…
We explore the minimax optimality of goodness-of-fit tests on general domains using the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD). The KSD framework offers a flexible approach for goodness-of-fit testing, avoiding strong distributional…
A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…
This paper proposes and studies a numerical method for approximation of posterior expectations based on interpolation with a Stein reproducing kernel. Finite-sample-size bounds on the approximation error are established for posterior…
We derive a new discrepancy statistic for measuring differences between two probability distributions based on combining Stein's identity with the reproducing kernel Hilbert space theory. We apply our result to test how well a probabilistic…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…
Modern large-scale kernel-based tests such as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) optimize kernel hyperparameters on a held-out sample via data splitting to obtain the most powerful test statistics. While…
We present a sequential version of the kernelized Stein discrepancy goodness-of-fit test, which allows for conducting goodness-of-fit tests for unnormalized densities that are continuously monitored and adaptively stopped. That is, the…
Knowing the error distribution is important in many multivariate time series applications. To alleviate the risk of error distribution mis-specification, testing methodologies are needed to detect whether the chosen error distribution is…
The recently developed "Data Set Diagonalization" method (DSD) is applied to measure compatibility of the data sets that are used to determine parton distribution functions (PDFs). Discrepancies among the experiments are found to be…
Distributional comparison is a fundamental problem in statistical data analysis with numerous applications in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. Numerous methods exist for distributional comparison but kernel Stein's method has…
Contrastive Divergence (CD) and Persistent Contrastive Divergence (PCD) are popular methods for training the weights of Restricted Boltzmann Machines. However, both methods use an approximate method for sampling from the model distribution.…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a non-parametric inference algorithm that evolves a set of particles to fit a given distribution of interest. We analyze the non-asymptotic properties of SVGD, showing that there exists a set of…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…
To improve the efficiency of Monte Carlo estimation, practitioners are turning to biased Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures that trade off asymptotic exactness for computational speed. The reasoning is sound: a reduction in variance due to…
In Bayesian inference, the posterior distributions are difficult to obtain analytically for complex models such as neural networks. Variational inference usually uses a parametric distribution for approximation, from which we can easily…