PAC-Bayes Bounds on Variational Tempered Posteriors for Markov Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Banerjee, Imon, Rao, Vinayak A., Honnappa, Harsha
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2021
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author Banerjee, Imon
Rao, Vinayak A.
Honnappa, Harsha
author_facet Banerjee, Imon
Rao, Vinayak A.
Honnappa, Harsha
contents Datasets displaying temporal dependencies abound in science and engineering applications, with Markov models representing a simplified and popular view of the temporal dependence structure. In this paper, we consider Bayesian settings that place prior distributions over the parameters of the transition kernel of a Markov model, and seeks to characterize the resulting, typically intractable, posterior distributions. We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of variational Bayes (VB) approximations to tempered Bayesian posterior distributions, bounding the model risk of the VB approximations. Tempered posteriors are known to be robust to model misspecification, and their variational approximations do not suffer the usual problems of over confident approximations. Our results tie the risk bounds to the mixing and ergodic properties of the Markov data generating model. We illustrate the PAC-Bayes bounds through a number of example Markov models, and also consider the situation where the Markov model is misspecified.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2101_05197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PAC-Bayes Bounds on Variational Tempered Posteriors for Markov Models
Banerjee, Imon
Rao, Vinayak A.
Honnappa, Harsha
Statistics Theory
Datasets displaying temporal dependencies abound in science and engineering applications, with Markov models representing a simplified and popular view of the temporal dependence structure. In this paper, we consider Bayesian settings that place prior distributions over the parameters of the transition kernel of a Markov model, and seeks to characterize the resulting, typically intractable, posterior distributions. We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of variational Bayes (VB) approximations to tempered Bayesian posterior distributions, bounding the model risk of the VB approximations. Tempered posteriors are known to be robust to model misspecification, and their variational approximations do not suffer the usual problems of over confident approximations. Our results tie the risk bounds to the mixing and ergodic properties of the Markov data generating model. We illustrate the PAC-Bayes bounds through a number of example Markov models, and also consider the situation where the Markov model is misspecified.
title PAC-Bayes Bounds on Variational Tempered Posteriors for Markov Models
topic Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05197