Improving Prediction from Dirichlet Process Mixtures via Enrichment

Flexible covariate-dependent density estimation can be achieved by modelling the joint density of the response and covariates as a Dirichlet process mixture. An appealing aspect of this approach is that computations are relatively easy. In this paper, we examine the predictive performance of these models with an increasing number of covariates. Even for a moderate number of covariates, we find that the likelihood for x tends to dominate the posterior of the latent random partition, degrading the predictive performance of the model. To overcome this, we suggest using a different nonparametric prior, namely an enriched Dirichlet process. Our proposal maintains a simple allocation rule, so that computations remain relatively simple. Advantages are shown through both predictive equations and examples, including an application to diagnosis Alzheimer's disease

Scalable Bayesian nonparametric regression via a Plackett-Luce model for conditional ranks

We present a novel Bayesian nonparametric regression model for covariates X and continuous, real response variable Y. The model is parametrized in terms of marginal distributions for Y and X and a regression function which tunes the stochastic ordering of the conditional distributions F(y|x). By adopting an approximate composite likelihood approach, we show that the resulting posterior inference can be decoupled for the separate components of the model. This procedure can scale to very large datasets and allows for the use of standard, existing, software from Bayesian nonparametric density estimation and Plackett-Luce ranking estimation to be applied. As an illustration, we show an application of our approach to a US Census dataset, with over 1,300,000 data points and more than 100 covariates