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Bayesian inference provides an attractive online-learning framework to analyze sequential data, and offers generalization guarantees which hold even with model mismatch and adversaries. Unfortunately, exact Bayesian inference is rarely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Kyurae Kim , Qiang Fu , Yi-An Ma , Jacob R. Gardner , Trevor Campbell

Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-27 Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Approximating a probability density in a tractable manner is a central task in Bayesian statistics. Variational Inference (VI) is a popular technique that achieves tractability by choosing a relatively simple variational family. Borrowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Francesco Locatello , Gideon Dresdner , Rajiv Khanna , Isabel Valera , Gunnar Rätsch

In variational inference, the benefits of Bayesian models rely on accurately capturing the true posterior distribution. We propose using neural samplers that specify implicit distributions, which are well-suited for approximating complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anshuk Uppal , Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt , Wouter Boomsma , Jes Frellsen

Variational inference is a popular method for estimating model parameters and conditional distributions in hierarchical and mixed models, which arise frequently in many settings in the health, social, and biological sciences. Variational…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-10 Ted Westling , Tyler H. McCormick

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) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-29 Thang D. Bui , Cuong V. Nguyen , Siddharth Swaroop , Richard E. Turner

Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) has been widely applied in large scale Bayesian inference. However MFVI, which assumes a product distribution on the latent variables, often leads to objective functions with many local optima, making…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-03-03 Mingzhang Yin , Y. X. Rachel Wang , Purnamrita Sarkar

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Variational Inference makes a trade-off between the capacity of the variational family and the tractability of finding an approximate posterior distribution. Instead, Boosting Variational Inference allows practitioners to obtain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Gideon Dresdner , Saurav Shekhar , Fabian Pedregosa , Francesco Locatello , Gunnar Rätsch

We investigate the frequentist guarantees of the variational sparse Gaussian process regression model. In the theoretical analysis, we focus on the variational approach with spectral features as inducing variables. We derive guarantees and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-09-29 Dennis Nieman , Botond Szabo , Harry van Zanten

Structured variational inference constitutes a core methodology in modern statistical applications. Unlike mean-field variational inference, the approximate posterior is assumed to have interdependent structure. We consider the natural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Shunan Sheng , Bohan Wu , Bennett Zhu , Sinho Chewi , Aram-Alexandre Pooladian

Estimating a distribution given access to its unnormalized density is pivotal in Bayesian inference, where the posterior is generally known only up to an unknown normalizing constant. Variational inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Daniel Ward , Mark Beaumont , Matteo Fasiolo

Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-24 Marc Lambert , Sinho Chewi , Francis Bach , Silvère Bonnabel , Philippe Rigollet

The abundance of modern health data provides many opportunities for the use of machine learning techniques to build better statistical models to improve clinical decision making. Predicting time-to-event distributions, also known as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-15 Zidi Xiu , Chenyang Tao , Benjamin A. Goldstein , Ricardo Henao

Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Ziyan Wang , Hao Wang

We propose a scalable variational Bayes method for statistical inference for a single or low-dimensional subset of the coordinates of a high-dimensional parameter in sparse linear regression. Our approach relies on assigning a mean-field…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Ismaël Castillo , Alice L'Huillier , Kolyan Ray , Luke Travis

A framework is presented for fitting inverse problem models via variational Bayes approximations. This methodology guarantees flexibility to statistical model specification for a broad range of applications, good accuracy and reduced model…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-09-05 Luca Maestrini , Robert G. Aykroyd , Matt P. Wand

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif