Efficient Uncertainty Propagation in Bayesian Two-Step Procedures

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Hauptverfasser: Jedhoff, Svenja, Kutabi, Hadi, Meyer, Anne, Bürkner, Paul-Christian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Jedhoff, Svenja
Kutabi, Hadi
Meyer, Anne
Bürkner, Paul-Christian
author_facet Jedhoff, Svenja
Kutabi, Hadi
Meyer, Anne
Bürkner, Paul-Christian
contents Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for probabilistic reasoning. If inference is performed in two steps, uncertainty propagation plays a crucial role in accounting for all sources of uncertainty and variability. This becomes particularly important when both aleatoric uncertainty, caused by data variability, and epistemic uncertainty, arising from incomplete knowledge or missing data, are present. Examples include surrogate models and missing data problems. In surrogate modeling, the surrogate is used as a simplified approximation of a resource-heavy and costly simulation. The uncertainty from the surrogate-fitting process can be propagated using a two-step procedure. For modeling with missing data, methods like Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) generate multiple datasets to account for imputation uncertainty. These approaches, however, are computationally expensive, as multiple models must be fitted separately to surrogate parameters respectively imputed datasets. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient two-step approach that reduces computational overhead while maintaining accuracy. By selecting a representative subset of draws or imputations, we construct a mixture distribution to approximate the desired posteriors using Pareto smoothed importance sampling. For more complex scenarios, this is further refined with importance weighted moment matching and an iterative procedure that broadens the mixture distribution to better capture diverse posterior distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10510
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Uncertainty Propagation in Bayesian Two-Step Procedures
Jedhoff, Svenja
Kutabi, Hadi
Meyer, Anne
Bürkner, Paul-Christian
Methodology
Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for probabilistic reasoning. If inference is performed in two steps, uncertainty propagation plays a crucial role in accounting for all sources of uncertainty and variability. This becomes particularly important when both aleatoric uncertainty, caused by data variability, and epistemic uncertainty, arising from incomplete knowledge or missing data, are present. Examples include surrogate models and missing data problems. In surrogate modeling, the surrogate is used as a simplified approximation of a resource-heavy and costly simulation. The uncertainty from the surrogate-fitting process can be propagated using a two-step procedure. For modeling with missing data, methods like Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) generate multiple datasets to account for imputation uncertainty. These approaches, however, are computationally expensive, as multiple models must be fitted separately to surrogate parameters respectively imputed datasets. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient two-step approach that reduces computational overhead while maintaining accuracy. By selecting a representative subset of draws or imputations, we construct a mixture distribution to approximate the desired posteriors using Pareto smoothed importance sampling. For more complex scenarios, this is further refined with importance weighted moment matching and an iterative procedure that broadens the mixture distribution to better capture diverse posterior distributions.
title Efficient Uncertainty Propagation in Bayesian Two-Step Procedures
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10510