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Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

Variational Bayes (VB) provides a computationally efficient alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo, especially for high-dimensional and large-scale inference. However, existing theory on VB primarily focuses on fixed-dimensional settings…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Jiawei Yan , Peirong Xu , Tao Wang

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-08-02 Nathaniel Tomasetti , Catherine S. Forbes , Anastasios Panagiotelis

Approximate Bayesian inference for models with computationally expensive, black-box likelihoods poses a significant challenge, especially when the posterior distribution is complex. Many inference methods struggle to explore the parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-11 Francesco Silvestrin , Chengkun Li , Luigi Acerbi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Dongyue Xie , Wanrong Zhu , Matthew Stephens

Variational Bayes (VB), a method originating from machine learning, enables fast and scalable estimation of complex probabilistic models. Thus far, applications of VB in discrete choice analysis have been limited to mixed logit models with…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-01-17 Rico Krueger , Prateek Bansal , Michel Bierlaire , Ricardo A. Daziano , Taha H. Rashidi

Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-09 Elliot Maceda , Emily C. Hector , Amanda Lenzi , Brian J. Reich

For training an encoder network to perform amortized variational inference, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence from the exact posterior to its approximation, known as the inclusive or forward KL, is an increasingly popular choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier

Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-02-27 Ryan Giordano , Tamara Broderick

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-11 Tom Huix , Anna Korba , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines

Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-15 Yue Yang , Ryan Martin , Howard Bondell

In this paper, we explore adaptive inference based on variational Bayes. Although several studies have been conducted to analyze the contraction properties of variational posteriors, there is still a lack of a general and computationally…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Ilsang Ohn , Lizhen Lin

Variational Bayes methods are popular due to their computational efficiency and adaptability to diverse applications. In specifying the variational family, mean-field classes are commonly used, which enables efficient algorithms such as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Shitao Fan , Ilsang Ohn , David Dunson , Lizhen Lin

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

We propose a variational Bayesian (VB) procedure for high-dimensional linear model inferences with heavy tail shrinkage priors, such as student-t prior. Theoretically, we establish the consistency of the proposed VB method and prove that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Jincheng Bai , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Minh-Ngoc Tran , Dang H. Nguyen , Duy Nguyen

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-08-05 Minh-Ngoc Tran , David J. Nott , Robert Kohn

Current methods for learning graphical models with latent variables and a fixed structure estimate optimal values for the model parameters. Whereas this approach usually produces overfitting and suboptimal generalization performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Hagai Attias

Inverse problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs) are widely used in science and engineering. Although such problems are generally ill-posed, different regularisation approaches have been developed to ameliorate this problem.…

Applications · Statistics 2022-03-23 Jan Povala , Ieva Kazlauskaite , Eky Febrianto , Fehmi Cirak , Mark Girolami