Related papers: Stepwise Variational Inference with Vine Copulas

Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…

We present a unified technique for sequential estimation of convex divergences between distributions, including integral probability metrics like the kernel maximum mean discrepancy, $\varphi$-divergences like the Kullback-Leibler…

Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…

Recent advances in the estimation of deep directed graphical models and recurrent networks let us contribute to the removal of a blind spot in the area of probabilistc modelling of time series. The proposed methods i) can infer distributed…

Solving Bayesian inference problems approximately with variational approaches can provide fast and accurate results. Capturing correlation within the approximation requires an explicit parametrization. This intrinsically limits this…

Copula models have become one of the most widely used tools in the applied modelling of multivariate data. Similarly, Bayesian methods are increasingly used to obtain efficient likelihood-based inference. However, to date, there has been…

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) is a widely used method for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions by product measures. It has been empirically observed that MFVI optimizers often suffer from mode collapse.…

Recent work in variational inference (VI) uses ideas from Monte Carlo estimation to tighten the lower bounds on the log-likelihood that are used as objectives. However, there is no systematic understanding of how optimizing different…

Deep learning has revolutionized the last decade, being at the forefront of extraordinary advances in a wide range of tasks including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, to name but a few. However, it…

The paper presents a new copula based method for measuring dependence between random variables. Our approach extends the Maximum Mean Discrepancy to the copula of the joint distribution. We prove that this approach has several advantageous…

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…

Based on the concept of a L\'evy copula to describe the dependence structure of a multivariate L\'evy process we present a new estimation procedure. We consider a parametric model for the marginal L\'evy processes as well as for the L\'evy…

Standard penalized methods of variable selection and parameter estimation rely on the magnitude of coefficient estimates to decide which variables to include in the final model. However, coefficient estimates are unreliable when the design…

Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower…

We propose a general procedure for estimating the variance-covariance matrix of two-step estimates of structural parameters in latent variable models. The method is partially simulation-based, in that it includes drawing simulated values of…

The proliferation of computing devices has brought about an opportunity to deploy machine learning models on new problem domains using previously inaccessible data. Traditional algorithms for training such models often require data to be…

Vine copulas offer flexible multivariate dependence modeling and have become widely used in machine learning. Yet, structure learning remains a key challenge. Early heuristics, such as Dissmann's greedy algorithm, are still considered the…

In variational inference (VI), the marginal log-likelihood is estimated using the standard evidence lower bound (ELBO), or improved versions as the importance weighted ELBO (IWELBO). We propose the multiple importance sampling ELBO…

Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…

An approach to modelling volatile financial return series using stationary d-vine copula processes combined with Lebesgue-measure-preserving transformations known as v-transforms is proposed. By developing a method of stochastically…