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.
Proposes efficient Gaussian approximations for non-Gaussian likelihoods.
Due to the intractable partition function, the exact likelihood function for a Markov random field (MRF), in many situations, can only be approximated. Major approximation approaches include pseudolikelihood and Laplace approximation. In this paper, we propose a novel way of approximating the likelihood function throug…
Test log-likelihood comparisons can be misleading.
Neural networks approximate likelihood ratios for complex models.
This research improves neural likelihood approximation for Bayesian inverse problems.
Improves hyperparameter learning in GP models with non-conjugate likelihoods.
A new method reduces dimensionality for better likelihood-free parameter estimation.
Likelihood-free (a.k.a. simulation-based) inference problems are inverse problems with expensive, or intractable, forward models. ODE inverse problems are commonly treated as likelihood-free, as their forward map has to be numerically approximated by an ODE solver. This, however, is not a fundamental constraint but jus…
Posterior inference with an intractable likelihood is becoming an increasingly common task in scientific domains which rely on sophisticated computer simulations. Typically, these forward models do not admit tractable densities forcing practitioners to make use of approximations. This work introduces a novel approach t…
In likelihood-free settings where likelihood evaluations are intractable, approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) addresses the formidable inference task to discover plausible parameters of simulation programs that explain the observations. However, they demand large quantities of simulation calls. Critically, hyperpara…
A new ABC method uses variational approximations for efficient inference.
New method uses neural exponential families for likelihood-free inference.
The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of the likelihood that identifies a probability measure which lies in the neighbor…
JANA trains networks to approximate Bayesian models efficiently.
Improved likelihood-free inference by localizing and refining low-dimensional approximations.
Bayesian approach learns invariances from data alone, but last layer approximation is not always sufficient.
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 objectives relates to approximating the posterior distribution. Developing such a conn…
Pseudo-Likelihood Inference improves ABC for high-dimensional Bayesian inference.
Framework for Bayesian inference using GP emulated MH sampler for noisy likelihoods.
DALTON improves ODE parameter estimation by learning from noisy data.
In many fields of science, generalized likelihood ratio tests are established tools for statistical inference. At the same time, it has become increasingly common that a simulator (or generative model) is used to describe complex processes that tie parameters of an underlying theory and measurement apparatus to hig…
New methods improve statistical accuracy of complex models without high computational cost.
We present an approximated maximum likelihood method for the multifractal random walk processes of [E. Bacry et al., Phys. Rev. E 64, 026103 (2001)]. The likelihood is computed using a Laplace approximation and a truncation in the dependency structure for the latent volatility. The procedure is implemented as a package…
A new method improves likelihood-free Bayesian inference by transforming summary statistics and using efficient Variational Bayes.
Temporal Point Processes (TPP) with partial likelihoods involving a latent structure often entail an intractable marginalization, thus making inference hard. We propose a novel approach to Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) involving approximate inference over the latent variables by minimizing a tight upper bound on …
We present and implement two algorithms for analytic asymptotic evaluation of the marginal likelihood of data given a Bayesian network with hidden nodes. As shown by previous work, this evaluation is particularly hard for latent Bayesian network models, namely networks that include hidden variables, where asymptotic ap…
Likelihood-free methods are an established approach for performing approximate Bayesian inference for models with intractable likelihood functions. However, they can be computationally demanding. Bayesian synthetic likelihood (BSL) is a popular such method that approximates the likelihood function of the summary statis…
Maximum likelihood (ML) estimation using Newton's method in nonlinear state space models (SSMs) is a challenging problem due to the analytical intractability of the log-likelihood and its gradient and Hessian. We estimate the gradient and Hessian using Fisher's identity in combination with a smoothing algorithm. We exp…
Neural likelihood approximates integer time series data efficiently.
A new method for training diffusion models using likelihood matching.
Likelihood-free inference refers to inference when a likelihood function cannot be explicitly evaluated, which is often the case for models based on simulators. Most of the literature is based on sample-based `Approximate Bayesian Computation' methods, but recent work suggests that approaches based on deep neural condi…
Proposes LFGP for likelihood-free Gaussian process regression.
Deep Gaussian processes provide a flexible approach to probabilistic modelling of data using either supervised or unsupervised learning. For tractable inference approximations to the marginal likelihood of the model must be made. The original approach to approximate inference in these models used variational compressio…
Proposes ABC method for discrete data, improving likelihood-free inference.
Bayesian synthetic likelihood (BSL) is a popular method for estimating the parameter posterior distribution for complex statistical models and stochastic processes that possess a computationally intractable likelihood function. Instead of evaluating the likelihood, BSL approximates the likelihood of a judiciously chose…
In high-dimensional data analysis, penalized likelihood estimators are shown to provide superior results in both variable selection and parameter estimation. A new algorithm, APPLE, is proposed for calculating the Approximate Path for Penalized Likelihood Estimators. Both the convex penalty (such as LASSO) and the nonc…
We propose an efficient algorithm for approximate computation of the profile maximum likelihood (PML), a variant of maximum likelihood maximizing the probability of observing a sufficient statistic rather than the empirical sample. The PML has appealing theoretical properties, but is difficult to compute exactly. Inspi…
This study tackles Gaussian process regression with summarized data.
We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian parameter inference in non-linear state-space models with intractable likelihoods. Sequential Monte Carlo with approximate Bayesian computations (SMC-ABC) is one approach to approximate the likelihood in this type of models. However, such approximations can be noisy and c…
A scalable method for estimating spatial data using VREML.
The paper proposes using path signatures for better inference in time series data.
Inference is typically intractable in high-treewidth undirected graphical models, making maximum likelihood learning a challenge. One way to overcome this is to restrict parameters to a tractable set, most typically the set of tree-structured parameters. This paper explores an alternative notion of a tractable set, nam…
This paper proposes a new method to approximate posterior distributions using generative neural networks trained via scoring rule minimization.
Neural networks estimate spatial process likelihoods efficiently.
In this paper we revisit the weighted likelihood bootstrap, a method that generates samples from an approximate Bayesian posterior of a parametric model. We show that the same method can be derived, without approximation, under a Bayesian nonparametric model with the parameter of interest defined as minimising an expec…
The paper develops ML algorithms for calibrating credit rating transition models for high and low default portfolios.
We consider Bayesian inference problems with computationally intensive likelihood functions. We propose a Gaussian process (GP) based method to approximate the joint distribution of the unknown parameters and the data. In particular, we write the joint density approximately as a product of an approximate posterior dens…
The Laplace approximation calls for the computation of second derivatives at the likelihood maximum. When the maximum is found by the EM-algorithm, there is a convenient way to compute these derivatives. The likelihood gradient can be obtained from the EM-auxiliary, while the Hessian can be obtained from this gradient …