Related papers: Probabilistic Inference and Learning with Stein's …
Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In…
Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…
Stein's method provides a way of bounding the distance of a probability distribution to a target distribution $\mu$. Here we develop Stein's method for the class of discrete Gibbs measures with a density $e^V$, where $V$ is the energy…
Motivated by the omnipresence of extreme value distributions in limit theorems involving extremes of random processes, we adapt Stein's method to include these laws as possible target distributions. We do so by using the generator approach…
Providing theoretical guarantees for parameter estimation in exponential random graph models is a largely open problem. While maximum likelihood estimation has theoretical guarantees in principle, verifying the assumptions for these…
As an application of Stein's method for Poisson approximation, we prove rates of convergence for the tail probabilities of two scan statistics that have been suggested for detecting local signals in sequences of independent random variables…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a prominent particle-based variational inference method used for sampling a target distribution. SVGD has attracted interest for application in machine-learning techniques such as Bayesian…
Stein's method is applied to obtain a general Cramer-type moderate deviation result for dependent random variables whose dependence is defined in terms of a Stein identity. A corollary for zero-bias coupling is deduced. The result is also…
Over the last 80 years there has been much interest in the problem of finding an explicit formula for the probability density function of two zero mean correlated normal random variables. Motivated by this historical interest, we use a…
Inspired by the seminal work on Stein Variational Inference and Stein Variational Policy Gradient, we derived a method to generate samples from the posterior variational parameter distribution by \textit{explicitly} minimizing the KL…
A Stein operator for the runs is derived as a perturbation of an operator for discrete Gibbs measure. Due to this fact, using perturbation technique, the approximation results for runs arising from identical and non-identical Bernoulli…
We provide a general result for finding Stein operators for the product of two independent random variables whose Stein operators satisfy a certain assumption, extending a recent result of Gaunt, Mijoule and Swan \cite{gms18}. This…
When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…
This exposition explains the basic ideas of Stein's method for Poisson random variable approximation and Poisson process approximation from the point of view of the immigration-death process and Palm theory. The latter approach also enables…
This work explores and develops elements of Stein's method of approximation, in the infinitely divisible setting, and its connections to functional analysis. It is mainly concerned with multivariate self-decomposable laws without finite…
We extend Stein's method to include dependence with respect to an auxiliary random variable, for conditional laws for which Stein's characterizations do exist.
Let $h$ be a three times partially differentiable function on $R^n$, let $X=(X_1,\dots,X_n)$ be a collection of real-valued random variables and let $Z=(Z_1,\dots,Z_n)$ be a multivariate Gaussian vector. In this article, we develop Stein's…
We present a novel second-order trajectory optimization algorithm based on Stein Variational Newton's Method and Maximum Entropy Differential Dynamic Programming. The proposed algorithm, called Stein Variational Differential Dynamic…
We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…