The Bayesian update: variational formulations and gradient flows

DOI10.1214/18-BA1137zbMATH Open1437.62113arXiv1705.07382OpenAlexW2962984936MaRDI QIDQ2297229FDOQ2297229

Authors: Nicolás García Trillos, Daniel Sanz-Alonso 

Publication date: 18 February 2020

Published in: Bayesian Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The Bayesian update can be viewed as a variational problem by characterizing the posterior as the minimizer of a functional. The variational viewpoint is far from new and is at the heart of popular methods for posterior approximation. However, some of its consequences seem largely unexplored. We focus on the following one: defining the posterior as the minimizer of a functional gives a natural path towards the posterior by moving in the direction of steepest descent of the functional. This idea is made precise through the theory of gradient flows, allowing to bring new tools to the study of Bayesian models and algorithms. Since the posterior may be characterized as the minimizer of different functionals, several variational formulations may be considered. We study three of them and their three associated gradient flows. We show that, in all cases, the rate of convergence of the flows to the posterior can be bounded by the geodesic convexity of the functional to be minimized. Each gradient flow naturally suggests a nonlinear diffusion with the posterior as invariant distribution. These diffusions may be discretized to build proposals for Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. By construction, the diffusions are guaranteed to satisfy a certain optimality condition, and rates of convergence are given by the convexity of the functionals. We use this observation to propose a criterion for the choice of metric in Riemannian MCMC methods.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07382

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zbMATH Keywords

Wasserstein spaceconvexitygradient flowsRiemannian MCMC

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Bayesian inference (62F15) Monte Carlo methods (65C05) Statistics on manifolds (62R30)

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Cited In (11)

• Differential equation-constrained optimization with stochasticity
• A note on parametric Bayesian inference via gradient flows
• Doob's consistency of a non-Bayesian updating process
• A Variational Inference Approach to Inverse Problems with Gamma Hyperpriors
• Stein variational gradient descent: many-particle and long-time asymptotics
• A geometric variational approach to Bayesian inference
• Accelerated information gradient flow
• Bayesian Probabilistic Numerical Methods
• Bayesian updating with two-step parallel Bayesian optimization and quadrature
• Wasserstein steepest descent flows of discrepancies with Riesz kernels
• On the consistency of graph-based Bayesian semi-supervised learning and the scalability of sampling algorithms

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