Bayesian Robustness: A Nonasymptotic Viewpoint


Abstract in English

We study the problem of robustly estimating the posterior distribution for the setting where observed data can be contaminated with potentially adversarial outliers. We propose Rob-ULA, a robust variant of the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA), and provide a finite-sample analysis of its sampling distribution. In particular, we show that after $T= tilde{mathcal{O}}(d/varepsilon_{textsf{acc}})$ iterations, we can sample from $p_T$ such that $text{dist}(p_T, p^*) leq varepsilon_{textsf{acc}} + tilde{mathcal{O}}(epsilon)$, where $epsilon$ is the fraction of corruptions. We corroborate our theoretical analysis with experiments on both synthetic and real-world data sets for mean estimation, regression and binary classification.

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