Related papers: Variational inference for steady-state BVARs
This paper introduces a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with stochastic volatility-in-mean and time-varying skewness. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed model allows both volatility and skewness to directly affect macroeconomic…
Many modern unsupervised or semi-supervised machine learning algorithms rely on Bayesian probabilistic models. These models are usually intractable and thus require approximate inference. Variational inference (VI) lets us approximate a…
One of the core problems of modern statistics is to approximate difficult-to-compute probability densities. This problem is especially important in Bayesian statistics, which frames all inference about unknown quantities as a calculation…
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…
Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs) are the workhorse in macroeconomic forecasting. Research in the last decade has established the importance of allowing time-varying volatility to capture both secular and cyclical variations in…
Variational Bayesian (VB) methods produce posterior inference in a time frame considerably smaller than traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo approaches. Although the VB posterior is an approximation, it has been shown to produce good…
Statistical models are central to machine learning with broad applicability across a range of downstream tasks. The models are controlled by free parameters that are typically estimated from data by maximum-likelihood estimation or…
Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…
Panel Vector Autoregressions (PVARs) are a popular tool for analyzing multi-country datasets. However, the number of estimated parameters can be enormous, leading to computational and statistical issues. In this paper, we develop fast…
I introduce a high-dimensional Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) framework designed to estimate the effects of conventional monetary policy shocks. The model captures structural shocks as latent factors, enabling computationally…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
Bayesian methods have proved powerful in many applications for the inference of model parameters from data. These methods are based on Bayes' theorem, which itself is deceptively simple. However, in practice the computations required are…
We propose a novel variational Bayes approach to estimate high-dimensional vector autoregression (VAR) models with hierarchical shrinkage priors. Our approach does not rely on a conventional structural VAR representation of the parameter…
As evidenced by various recent and significant papers within the frequentist literature, along with numerous applications in macroeconomics, genomics, and neuroscience, there continues to be substantial interest to understand the…
We introduce a flexible empirical Bayes approach for fitting Bayesian generalized linear models. Specifically, we adopt a novel mean-field variational inference (VI) method and the prior is estimated within the VI algorithm, making the…
Although linear regression models are fundamental tools in statistical science, the estimation results can be sensitive to outliers. While several robust methods have been proposed in frequentist frameworks, statistical inference is not…
A conventional Bayesian approach to prediction uses the posterior distribution to integrate out parameters in a density for unobserved data conditional on the observed data and parameters. When the true posterior is intractable, it is…
Variational Bayes (VB) is rapidly becoming a popular tool for Bayesian inference in statistical modeling. However, the existing VB algorithms are restricted to cases where the likelihood is tractable, which precludes the use of VB in many…
Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been…
Approximating complex probability densities is a core problem in modern statistics. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Variational Inference (VI), a popular method in machine learning that uses optimization techniques to estimate…