Bayesian nonparametric sparse VAR models

High dimensional vector autoregressive (VAR) models require a large number of parameters to be estimated and may suffer of inferential problems. We propose a new Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) Lasso prior (BNP-Lasso) for high-dimensional VAR models that can improve estimation efficiency and prediction accuracy. Our hierarchical prior overcomes overparametrization and overfitting issues by clustering the VAR coefficients into groups and by shrinking the coefficients of each group toward a common location. Clustering and shrinking effects induced by the BNP-Lasso prior are well suited for the extraction of causal networks from time series, since they account for some stylized facts in real-world networks, which are sparsity, communities structures and heterogeneity in the edges intensity. In order to fully capture the richness of the data and to achieve a better understanding of financial and macroeconomic risk, it is therefore crucial that the model used to extract network accounts for these stylized facts.Comment: Forthcoming in "Journal of Econometrics" ---- Revised Version of the paper "Bayesian nonparametric Seemingly Unrelated Regression Models" ---- Supplementary Material available on reques

Graph Theory and Networks in Biology

In this paper, we present a survey of the use of graph theoretical techniques in Biology. In particular, we discuss recent work on identifying and modelling the structure of bio-molecular networks, as well as the application of centrality measures to interaction networks and research on the hierarchical structure of such networks and network motifs. Work on the link between structural network properties and dynamics is also described, with emphasis on synchronization and disease propagation.Comment: 52 pages, 5 figures, Survey Pape

Distance Dependent Chinese Restaurant Processes

We develop the distance dependent Chinese restaurant process (CRP), a flexible class of distributions over partitions that allows for non-exchangeability. This class can be used to model many kinds of dependencies between data in infinite clustering models, including dependencies across time or space. We examine the properties of the distance dependent CRP, discuss its connections to Bayesian nonparametric mixture models, and derive a Gibbs sampler for both observed and mixture settings. We study its performance with three text corpora. We show that relaxing the assumption of exchangeability with distance dependent CRPs can provide a better fit to sequential data. We also show its alternative formulation of the traditional CRP leads to a faster-mixing Gibbs sampling algorithm than the one based on the original formulation