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We present a novel Bayesian inference tool that uses a neural network to parameterise efficient Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) proposals. The target distribution is first transformed into a diagonal, unit variance Gaussian by a series of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-06-03 Adam Moss

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

While Bayesian methods are extremely popular in statistics and machine learning, their application to massive datasets is often challenging, when possible at all. Indeed, the classical MCMC algorithms are prohibitively slow when both the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-04-23 Pierre Alquier , James Ridgway

In this paper, we consider objective Bayesian inference of the generalized exponential distribution using the independence Jeffreys prior and validate the propriety of the posterior distribution under a family of structured priors. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-26 Aojun Li , Keying Ye , Min Wang

Monte Carlo (MC) integration is the de facto method for approximating the predictive distribution of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). But, even with many MC samples, Gaussian-based BNNs could still yield bad predictive performance due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Agustinus Kristiadi , Runa Eschenhagen , Philipp Hennig

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

We propose prior distributions for all parts of the specification of a Markov mesh model. In the formulation we define priors for the sequential neighborhood, for the parametric form of the conditional distributions and for the parameter…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-07-27 Håkon Tjelmeland , Xin Luo

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

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Kush Bhatia , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Yixin Wang

As modern neural networks get more complex, specifying a model with high predictive performance and sound uncertainty quantification becomes a more challenging task. Despite some promising theoretical results on the true posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alisa Sheinkman , Sara Wade

Posterior sampling is a task of central importance in Bayesian inference. For many applications in Bayesian meta-analysis and Bayesian transfer learning, the prior distribution is unknown and needs to be estimated from samples. In practice,…

Computation · Statistics 2024-08-06 Chenyang Zhong , Shouxuan Ji , Tian Zheng

Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i) formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing the parameters to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-22 Christian A. Naesseth , Scott W. Linderman , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

This paper focuses on variational inference with intractable likelihood functions that can be unbiasedly estimated. A flexible variational approximation based on Gaussian mixtures is developed, by adopting the mixture population Monte Carlo…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-02 Zhijian He , Shifeng Huo , Tianhui Yang

Leveraging well-established MCMC strategies, we propose MCMC-interactive variational inference (MIVI) to not only estimate the posterior in a time constrained manner, but also facilitate the design of MCMC transitions. Constructing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Quan Zhang , Huangjie Zheng , Mingyuan Zhou

Bayesian inference of Gibbs random fields (GRFs) is often referred to as a doubly intractable problem, since the likelihood function is intractable. The exploration of the posterior distribution of such models is typically carried out with…

Computation · Statistics 2017-10-16 Aidan Boland , Nial Friel , Florian Maire

The main challenge in Bayesian models is to determine the posterior for the model parameters. Already, in models with only one or few parameters, the analytical posterior can only be determined in special settings. In Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-02 Sefan Hörtling , Daniel Dold , Oliver Dürr , Beate Sick

Using Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from posterior distributions was the key innovation which made Bayesian data analysis practical. Notoriously, however, MCMC is hard to tune, hard to diagnose, and hard to parallelize. This…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-18 Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-26 Linda S. L. Tan , Nial Friel

Methods based on Deep Learning have recently been applied on astrophysical parameter recovery thanks to their ability to capture information from complex data. One of these methods is the approximate Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) which…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-06-21 Héctor J. Hortúa , Luz Ángela García , Leonardo Castañeda C

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-03 Seunghyeon Kim , Kwangmin Lee , Yeonhee Park