The next generation of infrared spectroscopic solutions collect a massive amount of data that is realistically much too dense to be intuitively understood by a human. Thus, as a practical necessity, the user is generally interested in a smaller number of “latent” variables that aren’t directly observed. However, the usual method of considering a more manageable subset of the raw data throws away a great deal of collected information. The problem of distilling the latent variables and related uncertainties from the raw data is one of statistical inference. We adopt a Bayesian approach to better quantify the uncertainties in the latent variables. While our prior work has focused on exact inference methods such as Gibbs Sampling and Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo, we have begun exploring techniques for approximate inference, which allow such data analysis to proceed in quasi real-time.
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