Paper ID: 2409.04332

Amortized Bayesian Workflow (Extended Abstract)

Marvin Schmitt, Chengkun Li, Aki Vehtari, Luigi Acerbi, Paul-Christian Bürkner, Stefan T. Radev

Bayesian inference often faces a trade-off between computational speed and sampling accuracy. We propose an adaptive workflow that integrates rapid amortized inference with gold-standard MCMC techniques to achieve both speed and accuracy when performing inference on many observed datasets. Our approach uses principled diagnostics to guide the choice of inference method for each dataset, moving along the Pareto front from fast amortized sampling to slower but guaranteed-accurate MCMC when necessary. By reusing computations across steps, our workflow creates synergies between amortized and MCMC-based inference. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this integrated approach on a generalized extreme value task with 1000 observed data sets, showing 90x time efficiency gains while maintaining high posterior quality.

Submitted: Sep 6, 2024