The present article derives the minimal number $N$ of observations needed to consider a Bayesian posterior distribution as Gaussian. Two examples are presented. Within one of them, a chi-squared distribution, the observable $x$ as well as the parameter $ξ$ are defined all over the real axis, in the other one, the binomial distribution, the observable $x$ is an entire number while the parameter $ξ$ is defined on a finite interval of the real axis. The required minimal $N$ is high in the first case and low for the binomial model. In both cases the precise definition of the measure $μ$ on the scale of $ξ$ is crucial.
We investigate the posterior rate of convergence for wavelet shrinkage using a Bayesian approach in general Besov spaces. Instead of studying the Bayesian estimator related to a particular loss function, we focus on the posterior distribution itself from a nonparametric Bayesian asymptotics point of view and study its rate of convergence. We obtain the same rate as in \citet{abramovich04} where the authors studied the convergence of several Bayesian estimators.
We consider Bayesian inference in inverse regression problems where the objective is to infer about unobserved covariates from observed responses and covariates. We establish posterior consistency of such unobserved covariates in Bayesian inverse regression problemsunder appropriate priors in a leave-one-out cross-validation setup. We relate this to posterior consistency of inverse reference distributions (Bhattacharya (2013)) for assessing model adequacy. We illustrate our theory and methods with various examples of Bayesian inverse regression, along with adequate simulation experiments.
We derive the posteror contraction rate for non-parametric Bayesian estimation of a deterministic dispersion coefficient of a linear stochastic differential equation.
Variational and Bayesian methods are two approaches that have been widely used to solve image reconstruction problems. In this paper, we propose original connections between Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) partial differential equations and a broad class of Bayesian methods and posterior mean estimators with Gaussian data fidelity term and log-concave prior. Whereas solutions to certain first-order HJ PDEs with initial data describe maximum a posteriori estimators in a Bayesian setting, here we show that solutions to some viscous HJ PDEs with initial data describe a broad class of posterior mean estimat…
A Beta-Binomial-Logit model is a Beta-Binomial model with covariate information incorporated via a logistic regression. Posterior propriety of a Bayesian Beta-Binomial-Logit model can be data-dependent for improper hyper-prior distributions. Various researchers in the literature have unknowingly used improper posterior distributions or have given incorrect statements about posterior propriety because checking posterior propriety can be challenging due to the complicated functional form of a Beta-Binomial-Logit model. We derive data-dependent necessary and sufficient conditions for posterior pr…
Sparse Bayesian learning models are typically used for prediction in datasets with significantly greater number of covariates than observations. Such models often take a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) approach to carry out the task of prediction and can be implemented using either proper or improper priors. In this article we show that a few sparse Bayesian learning models in the literature, when implemented using improper priors, lead to improper posteriors.
Frequentist-style large-sample properties of Bayesian posterior distributions, such as consistency and convergence rates, are important considerations in nonparametric problems. In this paper we give an analysis of Bayesian asymptotics based primarily on predictive densities. Our analysis is unified in the sense that essentially the same approach can be taken to develop convergence rate results in iid, mis-specified iid, independent non-iid, and dependent data cases.
We study the posterior distribution of the Bayesian multiple change-point regression problem when the number and the locations of the change-points are unknown. While it is relatively easy to apply the general theory to obtain the $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ rate up to some logarithmic factor, showing the exact parametric rate of convergence of the posterior distribution requires additional work and assumptions. Additionally, we demonstrate the asymptotic normality of the segment levels under these assumptions. For inferences on the number of change-points, we show that the Bayesian approach can produce a…
Asymptotic theory of tail index estimation has been studied extensively in the frequentist literature on extreme values, but rarely in the Bayesian context. We investigate whether popular Bayesian kernel mixture models are able to support heavy tailed distributions and consistently estimate the tail index. We show that posterior inconsistency in tail index is surprisingly common for both parametric and nonparametric mixture models. We then present a set of sufficient conditions under which posterior consistency in tail index can be achieved, and verify these conditions for Pareto mixture model…
Optimality results for two outstanding Bayesian estimation problems are given in this paper: the estimation of the sampling distribution for the squared total variation function and the estimation of the density for the $L^1$-squared loss function. The posterior predictive distribution provides the solution to these problems. Some examples are presented to illustrate it. The Bayesian estimation problem of a distribution function is also addressed. Consistency of the estimator of the density is proved.
Marginalization techniques are presented for the Bayesian filtering problem under the assumption of Gaussian priors and posteriors and a set of sequentially more constraining state space model assumptions. The techniques provide the capabilities to 1) reduce the filtering problem to essential marginal moment integrals, 2) combine model and numerical approximations to the moment integrals, and 3) decouple modelling and system composition. Closed-form expressions of the posterior means and covariances are developed as functions of subspace projection matrices, subsystem models, and the marginal …
We consider a class of linear ill-posed inverse problems arising from inversion of a compact operator with singular values which decay exponentially to zero. We adopt a Bayesian approach, assuming a Gaussian prior on the unknown function. If the observational noise is assumed to be Gaussian then this prior is conjugate to the likelihood so that the posterior distribution is also Gaussian. We study Bayesian posterior consistency in the small observational noise limit. We assume that the forward operator and the prior and noise covariance operators commute with one another. We show how, for give…
In the Bayesian approach, the a priori knowledge about the input of a mathematical model is described via a probability measure. The joint distribution of the unknown input and the data is then conditioned, using Bayes' formula, giving rise to the posterior distribution on the unknown input. In this setting we prove posterior consistency for nonlinear inverse problems: a sequence of data is considered, with diminishing fluctuations around a single truth and it is then of interest to show that the resulting sequence of posterior measures arising from this sequence of data concentrates around th…
We consider Bayesian sample size determination using a criterion that utilizes the first two moments of the expected posterior variance. We study the resulting sample size in dependence on the chosen prior and explore the success rate for bounding the posterior variance below a prescribed limit under the true sampling distribution. Compared with sample size determination based on the expected average of the posterior variance the proposed criterion leads to an increase in sample size and significantly improved success rates. Generic asymptotic properties are proven, such as an asymptotic expre…
We consider inference in the scalar diffusion model $dX_t=b(X_t)dt+σ(X_t)dW_t$ with discrete data $(X_{jΔ_n})_{0\leq j \leq n}$, $n\to \infty,~Δ_n\to 0$ and periodic coefficients. For $σ$ given, we prove a general theorem detailing conditions under which Bayesian posteriors will contract in $L^2$-distance around the true drift function $b_0$ at the frequentist minimax rate (up to logarithmic factors) over Besov smoothness classes. We exhibit natural nonparametric priors which satisfy our conditions. Our results show that the Bayesian method adapts both to an unknown sampling regime and to unkn…
We consider the fractional posterior distribution that is obtained by updating a prior distribution via Bayes theorem with a fractional likelihood function, a usual likelihood function raised to a fractional power. First, we analyze the contraction property of the fractional posterior in a general misspecified framework. Our contraction results only require a prior mass condition on certain Kullback-Leibler (KL) neighborhood of the true parameter (or the KL divergence minimizer in the misspecified case), and obviate constructions of test functions and sieves commonly used in the literature for…
We consider a Bayesian nonparametric approach to a family of linear inverse problems in a separable Hilbert space setting with Gaussian noise. We assume Gaussian priors, which are conjugate to the model, and present a method of identifying the posterior using its precision operator. Working with the unbounded precision operator enables us to use partial differential equations (PDE) methodology to obtain rates of contraction of the posterior distribution to a Dirac measure centered on the true solution. Our methods assume a relatively weak relation between the prior covariance, noise covariance…
The asymmetric Laplace density (ALD) is used as a working likelihood for Bayesian quantile regression. Sriram et al.(2013) derived posterior consistency for Bayesian linear quantile regression based on the misspecified ALD. While their paper also argued for $\sqrt{n}-$consistency, Sriram and Ramamoorthi (2017) highlighted that the argument was only valid for a rate less than $\sqrt{n}$. So, the question of $\sqrt{n}-$rate has remained unaddressed, but is necessary to carry out meaningful Bayesian inference based on the ALD. In this paper, we derive results to obtain posterior consistency rates…
In order to estimate model parameters and circumvent possible difficulties encountered with the likelihood function, we propose to replace the likelihood in the formula of the posterior distribution by a function depending on a contrast. The properties of the contrast-based (CB) posterior distribution and MAP estimator are studied to understand what the consequences of incorporating a contrast in the Bayesian formula are. We show that the proposed method can be used to make frequentist inference and allows the reduction of analytical calculations to get the limit variance matrix of the estimat…
Statistical inference based on moment conditions and estimating equations is of substantial interest when it is difficult to specify a full probabilistic model. We propose a Bayesian flavored model selection framework based on (quasi-)posterior probabilities from the Bayesian Generalized Method of Moments (BGMM), which allows us to incorporate two important advantages of a Bayesian approach: the expressiveness of posterior distributions and the convenient computational method of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Theoretically we show that BGMM can achieve the posterior consistency for selecting…
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 …
Gaussian process models typically contain finite dimensional parameters in the covariance function that need to be estimated from the data. We study the Bayesian fixed-domain asymptotics for the covariance parameters in a universal kriging model with an isotropic Matern covariance function, which has many applications in spatial statistics. We show that when the dimension of domain is less than or equal to three, the joint posterior distribution of the microergodic parameter and the range parameter can be factored independently into the product of their marginal posteriors under fixed-domain a…
In this paper, we consider the so-called Shape Invariant Model which stands for the estimation of a function f0 submitted to a random translation of law g0 in a white noise model. We are interested in such a model when the law of the deformations is unknown. We aim to recover the law of the process P(f0,g0). In this perspective, we adopt a Bayesian point of view and find prior on f and g such that the posterior distribution concentrates at a polynomial rate around P(f0,g0) when n goes to infinity. We intensively use some Bayesian non parametric tools coupled with mixture models and believe tha…
We study posterior contraction behaviors for parameters of interest in the context of Bayesian mixture modeling, where the number of mixing components is unknown while the model itself may or may not be correctly specified. Two representative types of prior specification will be considered: one requires explicitly a prior distribution on the number of mixture components, while the other places a nonparametric prior on the space of mixing distributions. The former is shown to yield an optimal rate of posterior contraction on the model parameters under minimal conditions, while the latter can be…
When model uncertainty is handled by Bayesian model averaging (BMA) or Bayesian model selection (BMS), the posterior distribution possesses a desirable "oracle property" for parametric inference, if for large enough data it is nearly as good as the oracle posterior, obtained by assuming unrealistically that the true model is known and only the true model is used. We study the oracle properties in a very general context of quasi-posterior, which can accommodate non-regular models with cubic root asymptotics and partial identification. Our approach for proving the oracle properties is based on a…
The Bayesian approach is effective for inverse problems. The posterior density distribution provides useful information of the unknowns. However, for problems with non-unique solutions, the classical estimators such as the maximum a posterior (MAP) and conditional mean (CM) are not enough. We introduce two new estimators, the local maximum a posterior (LMAP) and local conditional mean (LCM). Their applications are demonstrated by three inverse problems: an inverse spectral problem, an inverse source problem, and an inverse medium problem.
We study posterior rates of contraction in Gaussian process regression with unbounded covariate domain. Our argument relies on developing a Gaussian approximation to the posterior of the leading coefficients of a Karhunen--Loéve expansion of the Gaussian process. The salient feature of our result is deriving such an approximation in the $L^2$ Wasserstein distance and relating the speed of the approximation to the posterior contraction rate using a coupling argument. Specific illustrations are provided for the Gaussian or squared-exponential covariance kernel.
We generalize the results of \cite{Capistran2016} on expected Bayes factors (BF) to control the numerical error in the posterior distribution to an infinite dimensional setting when considering Banach functional spaces and now in a prior setting. The main result is a bound on the absolute global error to be tolerated by the Forward Map numerical solver, to keep the BF of the numerical vs. the theoretical model near to 1, now in this more general setting, possibly including a truncated, finite dimensional approximate prior measure. In so doing we found a far more general setting to define and p…
In this paper, we consider the so-called Shape Invariant Model which stands for the estimation of a function $f^0$ submitted to a random translation of law $g^0$ in a white noise model. We are interested in such a model when the law of the deformations is unknown. We aim to recover the law of the process $\PP_{f^0,g^0}$ as well as $f^0$ and $g^0$. In this perspective, we adopt a Bayesian point of view and find prior on $f$ and $g$ such that the posterior distribution concentrates around $\PP_{f^0,g^0}$ at a polynomial rate when $n$ goes to $+\infty$. We obtain a logarithmic posterior contracti…
The classical Bayesian posterior arises naturally as the unique solution of several different optimization problems, without the necessity of interpreting data as conditional probabilities and then using Bayes' Theorem. For example, the classical Bayesian posterior is the unique posterior that minimizes the loss of Shannon information in combining the prior and the likelihood distributions. These results, direct corollaries of recent results about conflations of probability distributions, reinforce the use of Bayesian posteriors, and may help partially reconcile some of the differences between…
The main object of Bayesian statistical inference is the determination of posterior distributions. Sometimes these laws are given for quantities devoid of empirical value. This serious drawback vanishes when one confines oneself to considering a finite horizon framework. However, assuming infinite exchangeability gives rise to fairly tractable {\it a posteriori} quantities, which is very attractive in applications. Hence, with a view to a reconciliation between these two aspects of the Bayesian way of reasoning, in this paper we provide quantitative comparisons between posterior distributions …
Posterior contractions rates (PCRs) strengthen the notion of Bayesian consistency, quantifying the speed at which the posterior distribution concentrates on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of the true model, with probability tending to 1 or almost surely, as the sample size goes to infinity. Under the Bayesian nonparametric framework, a common assumption in the study of PCRs is that the model is dominated for the observations; that is, it is assumed that the posterior can be written through the Bayes formula. In this paper, we consider the problem of establishing PCRs in Bayesian nonparametric…
Bayesian inversion generates a posterior distribution of model parameters from an observation equation and prior information both weighted by hyperparameters. The prior is also introduced for the hyperparameters in fully Bayesian inversions and enables us to evaluate both the model parameters and hyperparameters probabilistically by the joint posterior. However, even in a linear inverse problem, it is unsolved how we should extract useful information on the model parameters from the joint posterior. This study presents a theoretical exploration into the appropriate dimensionality reduction of …
We study Bayesian discriminative inference given a model family $p(c,\x, θ)$ that is assumed to contain all our prior information but still known to be incorrect. This falls in between "standard" Bayesian generative modeling and Bayesian regression, where the margin $p(\x,θ)$ is known to be uninformative about $p(c|\x,θ)$. We give an axiomatic proof that discriminative posterior is consistent for conditional inference; using the discriminative posterior is standard practice in classical Bayesian regression, but we show that it is theoretically justified for model families of joint densities as…
The Bayesian method is noted to produce spuriously high posterior probabilities for phylogenetic trees in analysis of large datasets, but the precise reasons for this over-confidence are unknown. In general, the performance of Bayesian selection of misspecified models is poorly understood, even though this is of great scientific interest since models are never true in real data analysis. Here we characterize the asymptotic behavior of Bayesian model selection and show that when the competing models are equally wrong, Bayesian model selection exhibits surprising and polarized behaviors in large…
In this paper, we are concerned with attributing meaning to the results of a Bayesian analysis for a problem which is sufficiently complex that we are unable to assert a precise correspondence between the expert probabilistic judgements of the analyst and the particular forms chosen for the prior specification and the likelihood for the analysis. In order to do this, we propose performing a finite collection of additional Bayesian analyses under alternative collections of prior and likelihood modelling judgements that we may also view as representative of our prior knowledge and the problem st…
Despite their widespread use in practice, the asymptotic properties of Bayesian penalized splines have not been investigated so far. We close this gap and study posterior concentration rates for Bayesian penalized splines in a Gaussian nonparametric regression model. A key feature of the approach is the hyperprior on the smoothing variance, which allows for adaptive smoothing in practice but complicates the theoretical analysis considerably as it destroys conjugacy and precludes analytic expressions for the posterior moments. To derive our theoretical results, we rely on several new concepts i…
Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）；University of Science（理大学）；Vietnam National University（越南国立大学）；AISIA Research Lab（AISIA研究实验室）；University of Delaware（特拉华大学）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
In this paper, we study the learning rate of generalized Bayes estimators in a general setting where the hypothesis class can be uncountable and have an irregular shape, the loss function can have heavy tails, and the optimal hypothesis may not be unique. We prove that under the multi-scale Bernstein's condition, the generalized posterior distribution concentrates around the set of optimal hypotheses and the generalized Bayes estimator can achieve fast learning rate. Our results are applied to show that the standard Bayesian linear regression is robust to heavy-tailed distributions.
Due to their conjugate posteriors, Gaussian process priors are attractive for estimating the drift of stochastic differential equations with continuous time observations. However, their performance strongly depends on the choice of the hyper-parameters. We employ the marginal maximum likelihood estimator to estimate the scaling and/or smoothness parameter(s) of the prior and show that the corresponding posterior has optimal rates of convergence. General theorems do not apply directly to this model as the usual test functions are with respect to a random Hellinger-type metric. We allow for cont…
While there have been a lot of recent developments in the context of Bayesian model selection and variable selection for high dimensional linear models, there is not much work in the presence of change point in literature, unlike the frequentist counterpart. We consider a hierarchical Bayesian linear model where the active set of covariates that affects the observations through a mean model can vary between different time segments. Such structure may arise in social sciences/ economic sciences, such as sudden change of house price based on external economic factor, crime rate changes based on …
We consider the problem of estimating a sparse precision matrix of a multivariate Gaussian distribution, including the case where the dimension $p$ is large. Gaussian graphical models provide an important tool in describing conditional independence through presence or absence of the edges in the underlying graph. A popular non-Bayesian method of estimating a graphical structure is given by the graphical lasso. In this paper, we consider a Bayesian approach to the problem. We use priors which put a mixture of a point mass at zero and certain absolutely continuous distribution on off-diagonal el…
We investigate optimal posteriors for recently introduced \cite{begin2016pac} chi-squared divergence based PAC-Bayesian bounds in terms of nature of their distribution, scalability of computations, and test set performance. For a finite classifier set, we deduce bounds for three distance functions: KL-divergence, linear and squared distances. Optimal posterior weights are proportional to deviations of empirical risks, usually with subset support. For uniform prior, it is sufficient to search among posteriors on classifier subsets ordered by these risks. We show the bound minimization for linea…
