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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

Sparse variational approximations allow for principled and scalable inference in Gaussian Process (GP) models. In settings where several GPs are part of the generative model, theses GPs are a posteriori coupled. For many applications such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-30 Vincent Adam

Mixture models are widely used in Bayesian statistics and machine learning, in particular in computational biology, natural language processing and many other fields. Variational inference, a technique for approximating intractable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-08-03 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif , Pierre Alquier

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 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

The main computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to compute integrals against a high-dimensional posterior distribution. In the past decades, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a tractable approximation to these integrals,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Anya Katsevich , Philippe Rigollet

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch

Bayesian approach, as a useful tool for quantifying uncertainties, has been widely used for solving inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). One of the key difficulties for employing Bayesian approach for the issue is how…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Qian Zhao , Zongben Xu , Deyu Meng , Yee Leung

Modern methods for Bayesian regression beyond the Gaussian response setting are often computationally impractical or inaccurate in high dimensions. In fact, as discussed in recent literature, bypassing such a trade-off is still an open…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-04-14 Augusto Fasano , Daniele Durante , Giacomo Zanella

Variational approaches to approximate Bayesian inference provide very efficient means of performing parameter estimation and model selection. Among these, so-called variational-Laplace or VL schemes rely on Gaussian approximations to…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-01-17 Jean Daunizeau

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Timothy D. Barfoot , Gabriele M. T. D'Eleuterio

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Kush Bhatia , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Yixin Wang

We propose a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha$-VB, with provable statistical guarantees. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha$-VB with $\alpha=1$. When…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Yun Yang , Debdeep Pati , Anirban Bhattacharya

Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Oliver Dürr , Stephan Hörling , Daniel Dold , Ivonne Kovylov , Beate Sick

Variational Bayesian phylogenetic inference (VBPI) provides a promising general variational framework for efficient estimation of phylogenetic posteriors. However, the current diagonal Lognormal branch length approximation would…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2020-12-02 Cheng Zhang

Approximate inference in Bayesian deep networks exhibits a dilemma of how to yield high fidelity posterior approximations while maintaining computational efficiency and scalability. We tackle this challenge by introducing a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Son Nguyen , Duong Nguyen , Khai Nguyen , Khoat Than , Hung Bui , Nhat Ho

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

We introduce a novel one-parameter variational objective that lower bounds the data evidence and enables the estimation of approximate fractional posteriors. We extend this framework to hierarchical construction and Bayes posteriors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Kian Ming A. Chai , Edwin V. Bonilla

Hierarchical models represent a challenging setting for inference algorithms. MCMC methods struggle to scale to large models with many local variables and observations, and variational inference (VI) may fail to provide accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Tomas Geffner , Justin Domke