One-Step Estimator Paths for Concave Regularization

The statistics literature of the past 15 years has established many favorable properties for sparse diminishing-bias regularization: techniques that can roughly be understood as providing estimation under penalty functions spanning the range of concavity between ?₀ and ?₁ norms. However, lasso ?₁-regularized estimation remains the standard tool for industrial Big Data applications because of its minimal computational cost and the presence of easy-to-apply rules for penalty selection. In response, this article proposes a simple new algorithm framework that requires no more computation than a lasso path: the path of one-step estimators (POSE) does ?₁ penalized regression estimation on a grid of decreasing penalties, but adapts coefficient-specific weights to decrease as a function of the coefficient estimated in the previous path step. This provides sparse diminishing-bias regularization at no extra cost over the fastest lasso algorithms. Moreover, our gamma lasso implementation of POSE is accompanied by a reliable heuristic for the fit degrees of freedom, so that standard information criteria can be applied in penalty selection. We also provide novel results on the distance between weighted-?₁ and ?₀ penalized predictors; this allows us to build intuition about POSE and other diminishing-bias regularization schemes. The methods and results are illustrated in extensive simulations and in application of logistic regression to evaluating the performance of hockey players. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Full Bayesian analysis of claims reserving uncertainty

We revisit the gamma–gamma Bayesian chain-ladder (BCL) model for claims reserving in non-life insurance. This claims reserving model is usually used in an empirical Bayesian way using plug-in estimates for the variance parameters. The advantage of this empirical Bayesian framework is that allows us for closed form solutions. The main purpose of this paper is to develop the full Bayesian case also considering prior distributions for the variance parameters and to study the resulting sensitivities.     

Power and reversal power links for binary regressions: An application for motor insurance policyholders

In binary regression, symmetric links such as logit and probit are usually considered as standard. However, in the presence of unbalancing of ones and zeros, these links can be inappropriate and inflexible to fit the skewness in the response curve and likely to lead to misspecification. This is the case of covering some type of insurance, where it can be observed that the probability of a given binary response variable approaches zero at different rates than it approaches one. Furthermore, when usual links are considered, there is not a skewness parameter associated with the distribution chosen that, regardless of the linear predictor, is easily interpreted. In order to overcome such problems, a proposal for the construction of a set of new skew links is developed in this paper, where some of their properties are discussed. In this context, power links and their reversal versions are presented. A Bayesian inference approach using MCMC is developed for the presented models. The methodology is illustrated considering a sample of motor insurance policyholders selected randomly by gender. Results suggest that the proposed link functions are more appropriate than other alternative link functions commonly used in the literature. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于贝叶斯网络的智能故障诊断方法

首先提出了基于贝叶斯网络的智能故障诊断方法，它对于解决复杂设备诊断问题中存在的不确定性，关联性具有很大的优质。然后阐述了贝叶斯网络模型的数学描述及基于贝叶斯网络的故障诊断方法的基本思路和决策算法。最后以某型SINS／GPS组合导航系统的故障诊断应用实例说明了该方法的有效性。     

Heteroscedastic normal-exponential mixture models: Bayesian and classical approaches

In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian analysis for mixture of distributions belonging to the exponential family. As a special case we consider a mixture of normal exponential distributions including joint modeling of the mean and variance. We also consider joint modeling of the mean and variance heterogeneity. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are used to obtain the posterior summaries of interest. We also introduce and apply an EM algorithm, where the maximization is obtained applying the Fisher scoring algorithm. Finally, we also include analysis of real data sets to illustrate the proposed methodology.     

E-Bayesian estimation of the reliability derived from Binomial distribution

This paper introduces a new parameter estimation method, named E-Bayesian estimation method, to estimate reliability derived from Binomial distribution. The definition of E-Bayesian estimation of the reliability is proposed, the formulas of E-Bayesian estimation and hierarchical Bayesian estimation of the reliability are also provided. Finally, it is shown, through a numerical example, that the new method is much simpler than hierarchical Bayesian estimation in practice.     

Simulation metamodeling with dynamic Bayesian networks

This paper presents a novel approach to simulation metamodeling using dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) in the context of discrete event simulation. A DBN is a probabilistic model that represents the joint distribution of a sequence of random variables and enables the efficient calculation of their marginal and conditional distributions. In this paper, the construction of a DBN based on simulation data and its utilization in simulation analyses are presented. The DBN metamodel allows the study of the time evolution of simulation by tracking the probability distribution of the simulation state over the duration of the simulation. This feature is unprecedented among existing simulation metamodels. The DBN metamodel also enables effective what-if analysis which reveals the conditional evolution of the simulation. In such an analysis, the simulation state at a given time is fixed and the probability distributions representing the state at other time instants are updated. Simulation parameters can be included in the DBN metamodel as external random variables. Then, the DBN offers a way to study the effects of parameter values and their uncertainty on the evolution of the simulation. The accuracy of the analyses allowed by DBNs is studied by constructing appropriate confidence intervals. These analyses could be conducted based on raw simulation data but the use of DBNs reduces the duration of repetitive analyses and is expedited by available Bayesian network software. The construction and analysis capabilities of DBN metamodels are illustrated with two example simulation studies.     

Fusing multiple Bayesian knowledge sources

We address the problem of information fusion in uncertain environments. Imagine there are multiple experts building probabilistic models of the same situation and we wish to aggregate the information they provide. There are several problems we may run into by naively merging the information from each. For example, the experts may disagree on the probability of a certain event or they may disagree on the direction of causality between two events (e.g., one thinks A causes B while another thinks B causes A). They may even disagree on the entire structure of dependencies among a set of variables in a probabilistic network. In our proposed solution to this problem, we represent the probabilistic models as Bayesian Knowledge Bases (BKBs) and propose an algorithm called Bayesian knowledge fusion that allows the fusion of multiple BKBs into a single BKB that retains the information from all input sources. This allows for easy aggregation and de-aggregation of information from multiple expert sources and facilitates multi-expert decision making by providing a framework in which all opinions can be preserved and reasoned over.     

一种基于混合策略的自适应多输出高斯过程响应面法

针对工程结构数值模拟常常是矢量与函数(矢量函数)混合输出的特点,提出一种基于混合策略的含索引变量的矢量高斯过程响应面法,同时提出一种设计点自适应加密方法进一步提高效率。算例显示:本文方法能够优先拾取预测误差最大的点作为加密点;真实误差全部都落在最大可能误差范围之内,最大误差1.4%~1.6%远小于预设误差限5%,验证了本文方法的有效性。     

Gumbel分布的简单贝叶斯估计

在实际应用中,两参数Gumbel分布的贝叶斯估计往往需要预先知道Gumbel参数的二维联合先验分布。由于获取先验分布的主观性和统计推断的复杂性,目前有关Gumbel分布贝叶斯估计理论及其性质的讨论还比较少,更不要说获得较为简单的Gumbel分布的贝叶斯估计。本文基于Kaminskiy和Vasiliy提出的简单贝叶斯估计过程,利用可靠度函数估计的区间形式表示先验信息,从而得到两个参数Gumbel分布的简单贝叶斯估计。基于此先验信息,该估计过程构造了Gumbel参数的连续联合先验分布,给出了在给定任意时点的可靠度(或累积密度)及其标准差的后验估计,为可靠性与风险评估中简单快速的使用贝叶斯估计刻画极端事件提供了可能.