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Variational Bayes (VB) inference algorithm is used widely to estimate both the parameters and the unobserved hidden variables in generative statistical models. The algorithm -- inspired by variational methods used in computational physics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-27 Hideyuki Miyahara , Vwani Roychowdhury

The Pseudo-Marginal (PM) algorithm is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method used to sample from a target distribution when its density is inaccessible, but can be estimated with a non-negative unbiased estimator. Its performance…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-30 Sarra Abaoubida , Mylène Bédard , Florian Maire

Balancing computational efficiency with robust predictive performance is crucial in supervised learning, especially for critical applications. Standard deep learning models, while accurate and scalable, often lack probabilistic features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Conor Heins , Hao Wu , Dimitrije Markovic , Alexander Tschantz , Jeff Beck , Christopher Buckley

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

Given observed data and a probabilistic generative model, Bayesian inference searches for the distribution of the model's parameters that could have yielded the data. Inference is challenging for large population studies where millions of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-31 Louis Rouillard , Alexandre Le Bris , Thomas Moreau , Demian Wassermann

Mean-Field is an efficient way to approximate a posterior distribution in complex graphical models and constitutes the most popular class of Bayesian variational approximation methods. In most applications, the mean field distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-23 Pierre Baqué , Jean-Hubert Hours , François Fleuret , Pascal Fua

A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-05-14 Jan Luts , John T. Ormerod

Variational inference (VI) provides fast approximations of a Bayesian posterior in part because it formulates posterior approximation as an optimization problem: to find the closest distribution to the exact posterior over some family of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Fangjian Guo , Xiangyu Wang , Kai Fan , Tamara Broderick , David B. Dunson

Future wireless networks are envisioned to provide ubiquitous sensing services, which also gives rise to a substantial demand for high-dimensional non-convex parameter estimation, i.e., the associated likelihood function is non-convex and…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Zhixiang Hu , An Liu , Minjian Zhao

We present a variational inference (VI) framework that unifies and leverages sequential Monte-Carlo (particle filtering) with \emph{approximate} rejection sampling to construct a flexible family of variational distributions. Furthermore, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Rahul Sharma , Soumya Banerjee , Dootika Vats , Piyush Rai

We present a new approach-the ALVar estimator-to estimation of asymptotic variance in sequential Monte Carlo methods, or, particle filters. The method, which adjusts adaptively the lag of the estimator proposed in [Olsson, J. and Douc, R.…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-21 Alessandro Mastrototaro , Jimmy Olsson

In order to predict future performance of subsurface fluid reservoirs under possible operating scenarios, a dynamic, porous-medium flow simulation model must be tuned to include representative properties of the reservoir. Estimating…

Geophysics · Physics 2026-02-04 Zhen Zhang , Xuebin Zhao , Andrew Curtis

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Ying Li , Zhidi Lin , Yuhao Liu , Michael Minyi Zhang , Pablo M. Olmos , Petar M. Djurić

The Gaussian process latent variable model (GPLVM) is a popular probabilistic method used for nonlinear dimension reduction, matrix factorization, and state-space modeling. Inference for GPLVMs is computationally tractable only when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-16 Michael Minyi Zhang , Gregory W. Gundersen , Barbara E. Engelhardt

A key quantity of interest in Bayesian inference are expectations of functions with respect to a posterior distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo is a fundamental tool to consistently compute these expectations via averaging samples drawn…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-10 Heiko Strathmann , Dino Sejdinovic , Mark Girolami

In this article we consider likelihood-based estimation of static parameters for a class of partially observed McKean-Vlasov (POMV) diffusion process with discrete-time observations over a fixed time interval. In particular, using the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-12 Ajay Jasra , Mohamed Maama , Raul Tempone

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Anya Katsevich , Philippe Rigollet

Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-15 Alex Glyn-Davies , Arnaud Vadeboncoeur , O. Deniz Akyildiz , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Mark Girolami

We propose an optimization algorithm for Variational Inference (VI) in complex models. Our approach relies on natural gradient updates where the variational space is a Riemann manifold. We develop an efficient algorithm for Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-18 Martin Magris , Mostafa Shabani , Alexandros Iosifidis

Variational inference lies at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms. To improve the approximation of the posterior beyond parametric families, it was proposed to include MCMC steps into the variational lower bound. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Christopher Wolf , Maximilian Karl , Patrick van der Smagt