5 research outputs found
Exact Bayesian inference for the Bingham distribution
This paper is concerned with making Bayesian inference from data that are assumed to be drawn from a Bingham distribution. A barrier to the Bayesian approach is the parameter-dependent normalising constant of the Bingham distribution, which, even when it can be evaluated or accurately approximated, would have to be calculated at each iteration of an MCMC scheme, thereby greatly increasing the computational burden. We propose a method which enables exact (in Monte Carlo sense) Bayesian inference for the unknown parameters of the Bingham distribution by completely avoiding the need to evaluate this constant. We apply the method to simulated and real data, and illustrate that it is simpler to implement, faster, and performs better than an alternative algorithm that has recently been proposed in the literatur
Note on Posterior Inference for the Bingham Distribution
The properties of high-dimensional Bingham distributions have been studied by Kume and Walker. Fallaize and Kypraios propose Bayesian inference for the Bingham distribution and they use developments in Bayesian computation for distributions with doubly intractable normalising constants (Møller et al. 2006 ; Murray et al. 2006. However, they rely heavily on two Metropolis updates that they need to tune. In this paper we propose instead model selection with the marginal likelihood
Recent advances in directional statistics
Mainstream statistical methodology is generally applicable to data observed
in Euclidean space. There are, however, numerous contexts of considerable
scientific interest in which the natural supports for the data under
consideration are Riemannian manifolds like the unit circle, torus, sphere and
their extensions. Typically, such data can be represented using one or more
directions, and directional statistics is the branch of statistics that deals
with their analysis. In this paper we provide a review of the many recent
developments in the field since the publication of Mardia and Jupp (1999),
still the most comprehensive text on directional statistics. Many of those
developments have been stimulated by interesting applications in fields as
diverse as astronomy, medicine, genetics, neurology, aeronautics, acoustics,
image analysis, text mining, environmetrics, and machine learning. We begin by
considering developments for the exploratory analysis of directional data
before progressing to distributional models, general approaches to inference,
hypothesis testing, regression, nonparametric curve estimation, methods for
dimension reduction, classification and clustering, and the modelling of time
series, spatial and spatio-temporal data. An overview of currently available
software for analysing directional data is also provided, and potential future
developments discussed.Comment: 61 page