Bayesian inference

EigenVI: score-based variational inference with orthogonal function expansions

We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term in these …

Batch, match, and patch: low-rank approximations for score-based variational inference

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) scales poorly to high dimensional problems when it is used to estimate a multivariate Gaussian approximation with a full covariance matrix. In this paper, we extend the batch-and-match (BaM) framework for …

Batch and match: black-box variational inference using a score-based divergence

Most leading implementations of black-box variational inference (BBVI) are based on optimizing a stochastic evidence lower bound (ELBO). But such approaches to BBVI often converge slowly due to the high variance of their gradient estimates and their …

Multi-fidelity Monte Carlo: a pseudo-marginal approach

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an established approach for uncertainty quantification and propagation in scientific applications. A key challenge in applying MCMC to scientific domains is computation -- the target density of interest is often a …

Active multi-fidelity Bayesian online changepoint detection

Online algorithms for detecting changepoints, or abrupt shifts in the behavior of a time series, are often deployed with limited resources, e.g., to edge computing settings such as mobile phones or industrial sensors. In these scenarios it may be …

Exchangeable trait allocations

Trait allocations are a class of combinatorial structures in which data may belong to multiple groups and may have different levels of belonging in each group. Often the data are also exchangeable, i.e., their joint distribution is invariant to reordering. In clustering—a special case of trait allocation—exchangeability ...