A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Bayesian predictive inference analyzes a dataset to make predictions about new observations. When a model does not match the data, predictive accuracy suffers. We develop population empirical Bayes (POP-EB), a hierarchical framework that explicitly models the empirical population distribution as part of Bayesian analys…
Stochastic variational inference for Bayesian deep neural network (DNN) requires specifying priors and approximate posterior distributions over neural network weights. Specifying meaningful weight priors is a challenging problem, particularly for scaling variational inference to deeper architectures involving high dime…
An autonomous variational inference algorithm for arbitrary graphical models requires the ability to optimize variational approximations over the space of model parameters as well as over the choice of tractable families used for the variational approximation. In this paper, we present a novel combination of graph part…
To understand the empirical success of approximate MAP inference, recent work (Lang et al., 2018) has shown that some popular approximation algorithms perform very well when the input instance is stable. The simplest stability condition assumes that the MAP solution does not change at all when some of the pairwise pote…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) place priors over the parameters in a neural network. Inference in BNNs, however, is difficult; all inference methods for BNNs are approximate. In this work, we empirically compare the quality of predictive uncertainty estimates for 10 common inference methods on both regression and clas…
Inference models are a key component in scaling variational inference to deep latent variable models, most notably as encoder networks in variational auto-encoders (VAEs). By replacing conventional optimization-based inference with a learned model, inference is amortized over data examples and therefore more computatio…
We develop a general framework for distribution-free predictive inference in regression, using conformal inference. The proposed methodology allows for the construction of a prediction band for the response variable using any estimator of the regression function. The resulting prediction band preserves the consistency …
The paper introduces a DRM for causal inference, offering a flexible method to analyze counterfactual distributions.
problem Estimating mean causal effects is limited; a distributional perspective is needed for a more thorough understanding.
method The paper employs a semiparametric density ratio model (DRM) with an empirical likelihood (EL) approach to estimate counterfactual distribution functions.
result The DRM framework enables direct and transparent causal inference from a distributional perspective, validated by numerical studies.
While Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold the promise of being flexible, well-calibrated statistical models, inference often requires approximations whose consequences are poorly understood. We study the quality of common variational methods in approximating the Bayesian predictive distribution. For single-hidden laye…
Paper speeds up Gaussian process inference using Matérn kernels.
problem Efficiently performing Gaussian process inference for large datasets.
method Exact Matérn kernel decomposition into empirical cumulative distribution functions, combined with divide-and-conquer approach.
result The proposed algorithm significantly speeds up Gaussian process inference for low-dimensional problems with hundreds of thousands of data points.
We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a typically non-convex objective function is locally optimized over the parameters of t…