3,117 research outputs found
Dynamic density estimation with diffusive Dirichlet mixtures
We introduce a new class of nonparametric prior distributions on the space of
continuously varying densities, induced by Dirichlet process mixtures which
diffuse in time. These select time-indexed random functions without jumps,
whose sections are continuous or discrete distributions depending on the choice
of kernel. The construction exploits the widely used stick-breaking
representation of the Dirichlet process and induces the time dependence by
replacing the stick-breaking components with one-dimensional Wright-Fisher
diffusions. These features combine appealing properties of the model, inherited
from the Wright-Fisher diffusions and the Dirichlet mixture structure, with
great flexibility and tractability for posterior computation. The construction
can be easily extended to multi-parameter GEM marginal states, which include,
for example, the Pitman--Yor process. A full inferential strategy is detailed
and illustrated on simulated and real data.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/14-BEJ681 in the Bernoulli
(http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical
Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm
Particle Learning for General Mixtures
This paper develops particle learning (PL) methods for the estimation of general mixture models. The approach is distinguished from alternative particle filtering methods in two major ways. First, each iteration begins by resampling particles according to posterior predictive probability, leading to a more efficient set for propagation. Second, each particle tracks only the "essential state vector" thus leading to reduced dimensional inference. In addition, we describe how the approach will apply to more general mixture models of current interest in the literature; it is hoped that this will inspire a greater number of researchers to adopt sequential Monte Carlo methods for fitting their sophisticated mixture based models. Finally, we show that PL leads to straight forward tools for marginal likelihood calculation and posterior cluster allocation.Business Administratio
Sparse covariance estimation in heterogeneous samples
Standard Gaussian graphical models (GGMs) implicitly assume that the
conditional independence among variables is common to all observations in the
sample. However, in practice, observations are usually collected form
heterogeneous populations where such assumption is not satisfied, leading in
turn to nonlinear relationships among variables. To tackle these problems we
explore mixtures of GGMs; in particular, we consider both infinite mixture
models of GGMs and infinite hidden Markov models with GGM emission
distributions. Such models allow us to divide a heterogeneous population into
homogenous groups, with each cluster having its own conditional independence
structure. The main advantage of considering infinite mixtures is that they
allow us easily to estimate the number of number of subpopulations in the
sample. As an illustration, we study the trends in exchange rate fluctuations
in the pre-Euro era. This example demonstrates that the models are very
flexible while providing extremely interesting interesting insights into
real-life applications
A Simple Class of Bayesian Nonparametric Autoregression Models
We introduce a model for a time series of continuous outcomes, that can be expressed as fully nonparametric regression or density regression on lagged terms. The model is based on a dependent Dirichlet process prior on a family of random probability measures indexed by the lagged covariates. The approach is also extended to sequences of binary responses. We discuss implementation and applications of the models to a sequence of waiting times between eruptions of the Old Faithful Geyser, and to a dataset consisting of sequences of recurrence indicators for tumors in the bladder of several patients.MIUR 2008MK3AFZFONDECYT 1100010NIH/NCI R01CA075981Mathematic
Beta-Product Poisson-Dirichlet Processes
Time series data may exhibit clustering over time and, in a multiple time
series context, the clustering behavior may differ across the series. This
paper is motivated by the Bayesian non--parametric modeling of the dependence
between the clustering structures and the distributions of different time
series. We follow a Dirichlet process mixture approach and introduce a new
class of multivariate dependent Dirichlet processes (DDP). The proposed DDP are
represented in terms of vector of stick-breaking processes with dependent
weights. The weights are beta random vectors that determine different and
dependent clustering effects along the dimension of the DDP vector. We discuss
some theoretical properties and provide an efficient Monte Carlo Markov Chain
algorithm for posterior computation. The effectiveness of the method is
illustrated with a simulation study and an application to the United States and
the European Union industrial production indexes
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