Bayesian inference with finitely wide neural networks

Phys Rev E. 2023 Jul;108(1-1):014311. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.108.014311.

Abstract

The analytic inference, e.g., predictive distribution being in closed form, may be an appealing benefit for machine learning practitioners when they treat wide neural networks as Gaussian process in a Bayesian setting. The realistic widths, however, are finite and cause weak deviation from the Gaussianity under which partial marginalization of random variables in a model is straightforward. On the basis of multivariate Edgeworth expansion, we propose a non-Gaussian distribution in differential form to model a finite set of outputs from a random neural network, and derive the corresponding marginal and conditional properties. Thus, we are able to derive the non-Gaussian posterior distribution in Bayesian regression task. In addition, in the bottlenecked deep neural networks, a weight space representation of a deep Gaussian process, the non-Gaussianity is investigated through the marginal kernel and the accompanying small parameters.