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We present a method for dimensionality reduction of an affine variational inequality (AVI) defined over a compact feasible region. Centered around the Johnson Lindenstrauss lemma, our method is a randomized algorithm that produces with high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-11-11 Bharat Prabhakar , Ankur A. Kulkarni

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Felix Leibfried

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing an objective functional, which admits a variational form and is defined over probability distributions on the constrained domain, which poses challenges to both theoretical analysis and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-11 Dai Hai Nguyen , Tetsuya Sakurai

Distribution data refers to a data set where each sample is represented as a probability distribution, a subject area receiving burgeoning interest in the field of statistics. Although several studies have developed…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-09 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

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

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

We show that several machine learning estimators, including square-root LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection) and regularized logistic regression can be represented as solutions to distributionally robust optimization (DRO)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Jose Blanchet , Yang Kang , Karthyek Murthy

Amortized variational inference is an often employed framework in simulation-based inference that produces a posterior approximation that can be rapidly computed given any new observation. Unfortunately, there are few guarantees about the…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-26 Yash Patel , Declan McNamara , Jackson Loper , Jeffrey Regier , Ambuj Tewari

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Ruqi Zhang , Yingzhen Li , Christopher De Sa , Sam Devlin , Cheng Zhang

Bayesian inference has been broadly applied to statistical network analysis, but suffers from the expensive computational costs due to the nature of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms. This paper proposes a novel and…

Computation · Statistics 2025-09-03 Dingbo Wu , Fangzheng Xie

We formulate and solve a regression problem with time-stamped distributional data. Distributions are considered as points in the Wasserstein space of probability measures, metrized by the 2-Wasserstein metric, and may represent images,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-30 Amirhossein Karimi , Tryphon T. Georgiou

The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-21 Soumyadip Ghosh , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Edith Zhang

This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Neng Wan , Dapeng Li , Naira Hovakimyan

We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Tim Reichelt , Luke Ong , Tom Rainforth

This paper considers parameter estimation for nonlinear state-space models, which is an important but challenging problem. We address this challenge by employing a variational inference (VI) approach, which is a principled method that has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-15 Jarrad Courts , Adrian Wills , Thomas Schön , Brett Ninness

Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) is efficient in learning probabilistic models. Classic ADVI relies on the parametric approach to approximate the posterior. In this paper, we develop a spline-based nonparametric…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-12 Yuda Shao , Shan Yu , Tianshu Feng

Mean field variational inference (VI) is the problem of finding the closest product (factorized) measure, in the sense of relative entropy, to a given high-dimensional probability measure $\rho$. The well known Coordinate Ascent Variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Manuel Arnese , Daniel Lacker

Variational Bayesian Inference is a popular methodology for approximating posterior distributions over Bayesian neural network weights. Recent work developing this class of methods has explored ever richer parameterizations of the…

Variational inference uses optimization, rather than integration, to approximate the marginal likelihood, and thereby the posterior, in a Bayesian model. Thanks to advances in computational scalability made in the last decade, variational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-04 Jens Sjölund

Bayesian inference has become an important tool to solve inverse problems and to quantify uncertainties in their solutions. Variational inference is a method that provides probabilistic, Bayesian solutions efficiently by using optimization.…

Geophysics · Physics 2025-10-15 Xin Zhang , Andrew Curtis