Bayesian robustness under a skew-normal class of prior distribution

We develop a global sensitivity analysis to measure the robustness of the Bayesian estimators with respect to a class of prior distributions. This class arises when we consider multiplicative contamination of a base prior distribution. A similar structure was presented by van der Linde [12]. Some particular specifications for this multiplicative contamination class coincide with well known families of skewed distributions. In this paper, we explore the skew-normal multiplicative contamination class for the prior distribution of the location parameter of a normal model. Results of a Bayesian conjugation and expressions for some measures of distance between posterior means and posterior variance are obtained. We also elaborate on the behavior of the posterior means and of the posterior variances through a simulation study.     

Bayesian inspection model with the negative binomial prior in the presence of inspection errors

One of the basic assumptions in Bayesian inspection models is that we have some prior knowledge about the number of defects in a certain product or software system. The prior knowledge can be often described as a probability distribution (e.g., Poisson distribution). In the paper, we propose three conditions that should be put forth as desirable properties for a prior probability distribution of the number of defects in the product. We review various prior probability distributions and test if they meet those conditions. The negative binomial distribution is found to be the only one that satisfies all the desirable conditions. With the negative binomial prior, we analyze the effects of various parameters on the Bayesian estimate of the number of undetected errors still remaining in the product.     

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Step-stress accelerated degradation test (SSADT) is a useful tool for assessing the lifetime distribution of highly reliable products when the available test items are very few. In this paper, we discuss multiple-steps step-stress accelerated degradation models based on Wiener process, and we apply the objective Bayesian method for such analytically intractable models to obtain the noninformative priors (Jefferys prior and two Reference priors). Moreover, we show that their posterior distributions are proper, and we propose Gibbs sampling algorithms for the Bayesian inference based on the Jefferys prior and two Reference priors. Finally, we present some simulation studies to compare the objective Bayesian estimates with the other Bayesian estimate and the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs). Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of objective Bayesian analysis method.     

混合狄雷克利分布和高维表的贝叶斯估计

本文讨论多项分布情况下的高维列联表使用混合狄雷克利分布为先验分布时，贝叶斯估计的表达，以及独立性条件的表述．将文献［４］和［５］的结论推广到高维列联表中．     

Quadrature Methods for Bayesian Optimal Design of Experiments With Nonnormal Prior Distributions

Many optimal experimental designs depend on one or more unknown model parameters. In such cases, it is common to use Bayesian optimal design procedures to seek designs that perform well over an entire prior distribution of the unknown model parameter(s). Generally, Bayesian optimal design procedures are viewed as computationally intensive. This is because they require numerical integration techniques to approximate the Bayesian optimality criterion at hand. The most common numerical integration technique involves pseudo Monte Carlo draws from the prior distribution(s). For a good approximation of the Bayesian optimality criterion, a large number of pseudo Monte Carlo draws is required. This results in long computation times. As an alternative to the pseudo Monte Carlo approach, we propose using computationally efficient Gaussian quadrature techniques. Since, for normal prior distributions, suitable quadrature techniques have already been used in the context of optimal experimental design, we focus on quadrature techniques for nonnormal prior distributions. Such prior distributions are appropriate for variance components, correlation coefficients, and any other parameters that are strictly positive or have upper and lower bounds. In this article, we demonstrate the added value of the quadrature techniques we advocate by means of the Bayesian D-optimality criterion in the context of split-plot experiments, but we want to stress that the techniques can be applied to other optimality criteria and other types of experimental designs as well. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Weakly Informative Reparameterizations for Location-Scale Mixtures

While mixtures of Gaussian distributions have been studied for more than a century, the construction of a reference Bayesian analysis of those models remains unsolved, with a general prohibition of improper priors due to the ill-posed nature of such statistical objects. This difficulty is usually bypassed by an empirical Bayes resolution. By creating a new parameterization centered on the mean and possibly the variance of the mixture distribution itself, we manage to develop here a weakly informative prior for a wide class of mixtures with an arbitrary number of components. We demonstrate that some posterior distributions associated with this prior and a minimal sample size are proper. We provide Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) implementations that exhibit the expected exchangeability. We only study here the univariate case, the extension to multivariate location-scale mixtures being currently under study. An R package called Ultimixt is associated with this article. Supplementary material for this article is available online.     

A semiparametric Bayesian approach to the analysis of financial time series with applications to value at risk estimation

GARCH models are commonly used for describing, estimating and predicting the dynamics of financial returns. Here, we relax the usual parametric distributional assumptions of GARCH models and develop a Bayesian semiparametric approach based on modeling the innovations using the class of scale mixtures of Gaussian distributions with a Dirichlet process prior on the mixing distribution. The proposed specification allows for greater flexibility in capturing the usual patterns observed in financial returns. It is also shown how to undertake Bayesian prediction of the Value at Risk (VaR). The performance of the proposed semiparametric method is illustrated using simulated and real data from the Hang Seng Index (HSI) and Bombay Stock Exchange index (BSE30).     

无失效数据的Bayes和多层Bayes估计

对无失效数据的研究 ,是近些年来遇到的一个新问题 ,在实际问题中迫切需要解决 ,这项工作具有理论和实际应用价值 .本文对无失效数据 (ti,ni) ,在时刻ti 的失效概率pi=p{T 相似文献   

Bayesian shrinkage prediction for the regression problem

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 that of 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 the mean parameters depending on the future covariance matrix. With such a prior, we can construct a Bayesian predictive distribution dominating that based on the uniform prior.Lastly, applying this result to the prediction of response variables in the Normal linear regression model, we show that there exists a Bayesian predictive distribution dominating that based on the uniform prior. Minimaxity of these Bayesian predictions follows from these results.     

威布尔分布无失效数据失效概率的估计

通过讨论威布尔分布函数形状参数m的大小,给出各检测时刻失效概率pi的相互关系作为先验信息,得到pi(i=1,2,…,n)的Bayes估计,并且试验数据显示此种方法是可行的.     

On the posterior median estimators of possibly sparse sequences

We adopt the Bayesian paradigm and discuss certain properties of posterior median estimators of possibly sparse sequences. The prior distribution considered is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a symmetric unimodal distribution, and the noise distribution is taken as another symmetric unimodal distribution. We derive an explicit form of the corresponding posterior median and show that it is an antisymmetric function and, under some conditions, a shrinkage and a thresholding rule. Furthermore we show that, as long as the tails of the nonzero part of the prior distribution are heavier than the tails of the noise distribution, the posterior median, under some constraints on the involved parameters, has the bounded shrinkage property, extending thus recent results to larger families of prior and noise distributions. Expressions of posterior distributions and posterior medians in particular cases of interest are obtained. The asymptotes of the derived posterior medians, which provide valuable information of how the corresponding estimators treat large coefficients, are also given. These results could be particularly useful for studying frequentist optimality properties and developing statistical techniques of the resulting posterior median estimators of possibly sparse sequences for a wider set of prior and noise distributions.     

基于先验信息的社会碳成本贝叶斯不确定性分析

针对气候变化及经济影响存在的巨大不确定性,研究了气候变化不确定性以及先验信息对社会碳成本的影响.在贝叶斯理论框架下,采用指数分布刻画气候变化的分布特征,假设尾部变化率是一个随机变量,给出其伽玛先验分布,推导了气候变化分布的贝叶斯先验预测分布.并分别基于指数分布以及帕累托先验预测分布计算了社会碳排放成本.模拟分析发现,在未融合先验信息的情况下,由于尾部概率很小,不管是否修正消费与气候变化之间的关系,截尾社会碳成本和未截尾社会碳成本几乎重合.然而,在利用贝叶斯方法融合先验信息的情况下,社会碳成本容易受到先验信息的影响.但是,通过修正消费与气候变化之间的关系后,发现社会碳成本受先验信息的影响比较少.     

AN EFFICIENT SEQUENTIAL DESIGN FOR SENSITIVITY EXPERIMENTS

In sensitivity experiments, the response is binary and each experimental unit has a critical stimulus level that cannot be observed directly. It is often of interest to estimate extreme quantiles of the distribution of these critical stimulus levels over the tested products. For this purpose a new sequential scheme is proposed with some commonly used models. By using the bootstrap repeated-sampling principle, reasonable prior distributions based on a historic data set are specified. Then, a Bayesian strategy for the sequential procedure is provided and the estimator is given. Further, a high order approximation for such an estimator is explored and its consistency is proven. A simulation study shows that the proposed method gives superior performances over the existing methods.     

以截尾伽玛分布为先验分布的产品失效率的贝叶斯估计

本文研究了基于泊松分布的产品失效率估计问题.利用贝叶斯统计推断方法,获得了以截尾伽玛分布为先验分布时,产品失效率的贝叶斯估计和相关性质,推广了以伽玛分布为先验分布的贝叶斯估计结果.     

指数分布参数多层Bayes和E Bayes估计的性质

本文讨论无失效数据下指数分布参数多层Bayes估计和E Bayes估计的性质,在超参数分别取两种不同的先验分布下,证明参数的多层Bayes估计和E Bayes估计渐近相等,且多层Bayes估计值小于E Bayes估计值.     

Full and 1‐year runoff risk in the credibility‐based additive loss reserving method

In this paper, we consider the additive loss reserving (ALR) method in a Bayesian and credibility setup. The classical ALR method is a simple claims reserving method that combines prior information (e.g., premiums, number of contracts, market statistics) with claims observations. The Bayesian setup, which we present, in addition, allows for combining the information from a single runoff portfolio (e.g., company‐specific data) with the information from a collective (e.g., industry‐wide data) to analyze the claims reserves and the claims development result. However, in insurance practice, the associated distributions are usually unknown. Therefore, we do not follow the full Bayesian approach but apply credibility theory, which is distribution free and where we only need to know the first and second moments. That is, we derive the credibility predictors that minimize the expected squared loss within the class of affine‐linear functions of the observations (i.e., we derive linear Bayesian predictors). Using non‐informative priors, we link our credibility‐based ALR method to the classical ALR method and show that the credibility predictors coincide with the predictors in the classical ALR method. Moreover, we quantify the 1‐year risk and the full reserve risk by means of the conditional mean square error of prediction. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Bayesian network model for spatial event surveillance

Methods for spatial cluster detection attempt to locate spatial subregions of some larger region where the count of some occurrences is higher than expected. Event surveillance consists of monitoring a region in order to detect emerging patterns that are indicative of some event of interest. In spatial event surveillance, we search for emerging patterns in spatial subregions.A well-known method for spatial cluster detection is Kulldorff’s [M. Kulldorff, A spatial scan statistic, Communications in Statistics: Theory and Methods 26 (6) (1997)] spatial scan statistic, which directly analyzes the counts of occurrences in the subregions. Neill et al. [D.B. Neill, A.W. Moore, G.F. Cooper, A Bayesian spatial scan statistic, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 18 (2005)] developed a Bayesian spatial scan statistic called BSS, which also directly analyzes the counts.We developed a new Bayesian-network-based spatial scan statistic, called BNetScan, which models the relationships among the events of interest and the observable events using a Bayesian network. BNetScan is an entity-based Bayesian network that models the underlying state and observable variables for each individual in a population.We compared the performance of BNetScan to Kulldorff’s spatial scan statistic and BSS using simulated outbreaks of influenza and cryptosporidiosis injected into real Emergency Department data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. It is an open question whether we can obtain acceptable results using a Bayesian network if the probability distributions in the network do not closely reflect reality, and thus, we examined the robustness of BNetScan relative to the probability distributions used to generate the data in the experiments. Our results indicate that BNetScan outperforms the other methods and its performance is robust relative to the probability distribution that is used to generate the data.     

A prior near-ignorance Gaussian process model for nonparametric regression

This paper proposes a prior near-ignorance model for regression based on a set of Gaussian Processes (GP). GPs are natural prior distributions for Bayesian regression. They offer a great modeling flexibility and have found widespread application in many regression problems. However, a GP requires the prior elicitation of its mean function, which represents our prior belief about the shape of the regression function, and of the covariance between any two function values.In the absence of prior information, it may be difficult to fully specify these infinite dimensional parameters. In this work, by modeling the prior mean of the GP as a linear combination of a set of basis functions and assuming as prior for the combination coefficients a set of conjugate distributions obtained as limits of truncate exponential priors, we have been able to model prior ignorance about the mean of the GP. The resulting model satisfies translation invariance, learning and, under some constraints, convergence, which are desirable properties for a prior near-ignorance model. Moreover, it is shown in this paper how this model can be extended to allow for a weaker specification of the GP covariance between function values, by letting each basis function to vary in a set of functions.Application to hypothesis testing has shown how the use of this model induces the capability of automatically detecting when a reliable decision cannot be made based on the available data.     

A COMPOUND POISSON MODEL FOR LEARNING DISCRETE BAYESIAN NETWORKS

We introduce here the concept of Bayesian networks, in compound Poisson model, which provides a graphical modeling framework that encodes the joint probability distribution for a set of random variables within a directed acyclic graph. We suggest an approach proposal which offers a new mixed implicit estimator. We show that the implicit approach applied in compound Poisson model is very attractive for its ability to understand data and does not require any prior information. A comparative study between learned estimates given by implicit and by standard Bayesian approaches is established. Under some conditions and based on minimal squared error calculations, we show that the mixed implicit estimator is better than the standard Bayesian and the maximum likelihood estimators. We illustrate our approach by considering a simulation study in the context of mobile communication networks.     

Dirichlet process and its developments: a survey

The core of the nonparametric/semiparametric Bayesian analysis is to relax the particular parametric assumptions on the distributions of interest to be unknown and random, and assign them a prior. Selecting a suitable prior therefore is especially critical in the nonparametric Bayesian fitting. As the distribution of distribution, Dirichlet process (DP) is the most appreciated nonparametric prior due to its nice theoretical proprieties, modeling flexibility and computational feasibility. In this paper, we review and summarize some developments of DP during the past decades. Our focus is mainly concentrated upon its theoretical properties, various extensions, statistical modeling and applications to the latent variable models.