Shrinkage prior are becoming more and more popular in Bayesian modeling for high dimensional sparse problems due to its computational efficiency. Recent works show that a polynomially decaying prior leads to satisfactory posterior asymptotics under regression models. In the literature, statisticians have investigated how the global shrinkage parameter, i.e., the scale parameter, in a heavy tail prior affects the posterior contraction. In this work, we explore how the shape of the prior, or more specifically, the polynomial order of the prior tail affects the posterior. We discover that, under the sparse normal means models, the polynomial order does affect the multiplicative constant of the posterior contraction rate. More importantly, if the polynomial order is sufficiently close to 1, it will induce the optimal Bayesian posterior convergence, in the sense that the Bayesian contraction rate is sharply minimax, i.e., not only the order, but also the multiplicative constant of the posterior contraction rate are optimal. The above Bayesian sharp minimaxity holds when the global shrinkage parameter follows a deterministic choice which depends on the unknown sparsity $s$. Therefore, a Beta-prior modeling is further proposed, such that our sharply minimax Bayesian procedure is adaptive to unknown $s$. Our theoretical discoveries are justified by simulation studies.
In this article, we consider two forms of shrinkage estimators of the mean $θ$ of a multivariate normal distribution $X\sim N_{p}\left(θ, σ^{2}I_{p}\right)$ where $σ^{2}$ is unknown. We take the prior law $θ\sim N_{p}\left(\upsilon, τ^{2}I_{p}\right)$ and we constuct a Modified Bayes estimator $δ_{B}^{\ast}$ and an Empirical Modified Bayes estimator $δ_{EB}^{\ast}$. We are interested in studying the minimaxity and the limits of risks ratios of these estimators, to the maximum likelihood estimator $X$, when $n$ and $p$ tend to infinity.
In this article, we investigate certain asymptotic optimality properties of a very broad class of one-group continuous shrinkage priors for simultaneous estimation and testing of a sparse normal mean vector. Asymptotic optimality of Bayes estimates and posterior concentration properties corresponding to the general class of one-group priors under consideration are studied where the data is assumed to be generated according to a multivariate normal distribution with a fixed unknown mean vector. Under the assumption that the number of non-zero means is known, we show that Bayes estimators arisin…
We consider Bayesian shrinkage predictions for the Normal regression problem under the frequentist Kullback-Leibler risk function. Firstly, we consider the multivariate Normal model with an unknown mean and a known covariance. While the unknown mean is fixed, the covariance of future samples can be different from training samples. We show that the Bayesian predictive distribution based on the uniform prior is dominated by that based on a class of priors if the prior distributions for the covariance and future covariance matrices are rotation invariant. Then, we consider a class of priors for t…
A new class of minimax Stein-type shrinkage estimators of a multivariate normal mean is studied where the shrinkage factor is based on an l_p norm. The proposed estimators allow some but not all coordinates to be estimated by 0 thereby allow sparsity as well as minimaxity.
In a remarkable series of papers beginning in 1956, Charles Stein set the stage for the future development of minimax shrinkage estimators of a multivariate normal mean under quadratic loss. More recently, parallel developments have seen the emergence of minimax shrinkage estimators of multivariate normal predictive densities under Kullback--Leibler risk. We here describe these parallels emphasizing the focus on Bayes procedures and the derivation of the superharmonic conditions for minimaxity as well as further developments of new minimax shrinkage predictive density estimators including mult…
Penalized regression methods, such as $L_1$ regularization, are routinely used in high-dimensional applications, and there is a rich literature on optimality properties under sparsity assumptions. In the Bayesian paradigm, sparsity is routinely induced through two-component mixture priors having a probability mass at zero, but such priors encounter daunting computational problems in high dimensions. This has motivated an amazing variety of continuous shrinkage priors, which can be expressed as global-local scale mixtures of Gaussians, facilitating computation. In sharp contrast to the correspo…
Penalized regression methods, such as $L_1$ regularization, are routinely used in high-dimensional applications, and there is a rich literature on optimality properties under sparsity assumptions. In the Bayesian paradigm, sparsity is routinely induced through two-component mixture priors having a probability mass at zero, but such priors encounter daunting computational problems in high dimensions. This has motivated an amazing variety of continuous shrinkage priors, which can be expressed as global-local scale mixtures of Gaussians, facilitating computation. In sharp contrast to the frequent…
Locally adaptive shrinkage in the Bayesian framework is achieved through the use of local-global prior distributions that model both the global level of sparsity as well as individual shrinkage parameters for mean structure parameters. The most popular of these models is the Horseshoe prior and its variants due to their spike and slab behavior involving an asymptote at the origin and heavy tails. In this article, we present an alternative Horseshoe prior that exhibits both a sharper asymptote at the origin as well as heavier tails, which we call the Heavy-tailed Horseshoe prior. We prove that …
The problem of estimating the shift (or, equivalently, the center of symmetry) of an unknown symmetric and periodic function $f$ observed in Gaussian white noise is considered. Using the blockwise Stein method, a penalized profile likelihood with a data-driven penalization is introduced so that the estimator of the center of symmetry is defined as the maximizer of the penalized profile likelihood. This estimator has the advantage of being independent of the functional class to which the signal $f$ si assumed to belong and, furthermore, is shown to be semiparametrically adaptive and efficient. …
We study the problem of sparse signal detection on a spatial domain. We propose a novel approach to model continuous signals that are sparse and piecewise smooth as product of independent Gaussian processes (PING) with a smooth covariance kernel. The smoothness of the PING process is ensured by the smoothness of the covariance kernels of Gaussian components in the product, and sparsity is controlled by the number of components. The bivariate kurtosis of the PING process shows more components in the product results in thicker tail and sharper peak at zero. The simulation results demonstrate the…
In many large-scale inverse problems, such as computed tomography and image deblurring, characterization of sharp edges in the solution is desired. Within the Bayesian approach to inverse problems, edge-preservation is often achieved using Markov random field priors based on heavy-tailed distributions. Another strategy, popular in statistics, is the application of hierarchical shrinkage priors. An advantage of this formulation lies in expressing the prior as a conditionally Gaussian distribution depending of global and local hyperparameters which are endowed with heavy-tailed hyperpriors. In t…
This paper considers the problem of isolating a small number of exchange traded funds (ETFs) that suffice to capture the fundamental dimensions of variation in U.S. financial markets. First, the data is fit to a vector-valued Bayesian regression model, which is a matrix-variate generalization of the well known stochastic search variable selection (SSVS) of George and McCulloch (1993). ETF selection is then performed using the decoupled shrinkage and selection (DSS) procedure described in Hahn and Carvalho (2015), adapted in two ways: to the vector-response setting and to incorporate stochastic…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆-凯特琳癌症中心）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）
Exploratory cancer drug studies test multiple tumor cell lines against multiple candidate drugs. The goal in each paired (cell line, drug) experiment is to map out the dose-response curve of the cell line as the dose level of the drug increases. We propose Bayesian Tensor Filtering (BTF), a hierarchical Bayesian model for dose-response modeling in multi-sample, multi-treatment cancer drug studies. BTF uses low-dimensional embeddings to share statistical strength between similar drugs and similar cell lines. Structured shrinkage priors in BTF encourage smoothness in the dose-response curves whi…
We consider the classical problems of estimating the mean of an $n$-dimensional normally (with identity covariance matrix) or Poisson distributed vector under the squared loss. In a Bayesian setting the optimal estimator is given by the prior-dependent conditional mean. In a frequentist setting various shrinkage methods were developed over the last century. The framework of empirical Bayes, put forth by Robbins (1956), combines Bayesian and frequentist mindsets by postulating that the parameters are independent but with an unknown prior and aims to use a fully data-driven estimator to compete …
