3,344 research outputs found
Bayesian Nonparametric Calibration and Combination of Predictive Distributions
We introduce a Bayesian approach to predictive density calibration and
combination that accounts for parameter uncertainty and model set
incompleteness through the use of random calibration functionals and random
combination weights. Building on the work of Ranjan, R. and Gneiting, T. (2010)
and Gneiting, T. and Ranjan, R. (2013), we use infinite beta mixtures for the
calibration. The proposed Bayesian nonparametric approach takes advantage of
the flexibility of Dirichlet process mixtures to achieve any continuous
deformation of linearly combined predictive distributions. The inference
procedure is based on Gibbs sampling and allows accounting for uncertainty in
the number of mixture components, mixture weights, and calibration parameters.
The weak posterior consistency of the Bayesian nonparametric calibration is
provided under suitable conditions for unknown true density. We study the
methodology in simulation examples with fat tails and multimodal densities and
apply it to density forecasts of daily S&P returns and daily maximum wind speed
at the Frankfurt airport.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1305.2026 by other author
Local Exchangeability
Exchangeability---in which the distribution of an infinite sequence is
invariant to reorderings of its elements---implies the existence of a simple
conditional independence structure that may be leveraged in the design of
probabilistic models, efficient inference algorithms, and randomization-based
testing procedures. In practice, however, this assumption is too strong an
idealization; the distribution typically fails to be exactly invariant to
permutations and de Finetti's representation theory does not apply. Thus there
is the need for a distributional assumption that is both weak enough to hold in
practice, and strong enough to guarantee a useful underlying representation. We
introduce a relaxed notion of local exchangeability---where swapping data
associated with nearby covariates causes a bounded change in the distribution.
We prove that locally exchangeable processes correspond to independent
observations from an underlying measure-valued stochastic process. We thereby
show that de Finetti's theorem is robust to perturbation and provide further
justification for the Bayesian modelling approach. Using this probabilistic
result, we develop three novel statistical procedures for (1) estimating the
underlying process via local empirical measures, (2) testing via local
randomization, and (3) estimating the canonical premetric of local
exchangeability. These three procedures extend the applicability of previous
exchangeability-based methods without sacrificing rigorous statistical
guarantees. The paper concludes with examples of popular statistical models
that exhibit local exchangeability
Generalized Dirichlet distributions on the ball and moments
The geometry of unit -dimensional balls has been intensively
investigated in the past decades. A particular topic of interest has been the
study of the asymptotics of their projections. Apart from their intrinsic
interest, such questions have applications in several probabilistic and
geometric contexts (Barthe et al. 2005). In this paper, our aim is to revisit
some known results of this flavour with a new point of view. Roughly speaking,
we will endow the ball with some kind of Dirichlet distribution that
generalizes the uniform one and will follow the method developed in Skibinsky
(1967), Chang et al. (1993) in the context of the randomized moment space. The
main idea is to build a suitable coordinate change involving independent random
variables. Moreover, we will shed light on a nice connection between the
randomized balls and the randomized moment space.Comment: Last section modified. Article accepted by ALE
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
The Bayesian sampler : generic Bayesian inference causes incoherence in human probability
Human probability judgments are systematically biased, in apparent tension with Bayesian models of cognition. But perhaps the brain does not represent probabilities explicitly, but approximates probabilistic calculations through a process of sampling, as used in computational probabilistic models in statistics. Naïve probability estimates can be obtained by calculating the relative frequency of an event within a sample, but these estimates tend to be extreme when the sample size is small. We propose instead that people use a generic prior to improve the accuracy of their probability estimates based on samples, and we call this model the Bayesian sampler. The Bayesian sampler trades off the coherence of probabilistic judgments for improved accuracy, and provides a single framework for explaining phenomena associated with diverse biases and heuristics such as conservatism and the conjunction fallacy. The approach turns out to provide a rational reinterpretation of “noise” in an important recent model of probability judgment, the probability theory plus noise model (Costello & Watts, 2014, 2016a, 2017; Costello & Watts, 2019; Costello, Watts, & Fisher, 2018), making equivalent average predictions for simple events, conjunctions, and disjunctions. The Bayesian sampler does, however, make distinct predictions for conditional probabilities and distributions of probability estimates. We show in 2 new experiments that this model better captures these mean judgments both qualitatively and quantitatively; which model best fits individual distributions of responses depends on the assumed size of the cognitive sample
Four moments theorems on Markov chains
We obtain quantitative Four Moments Theorems establishing convergence
of the laws of elements of a Markov chaos to a Pearson distribution,
where the only assumptionwemake on the Pearson distribution is that it admits
four moments. While in general one cannot use moments to establish convergence
to a heavy-tailed distributions, we provide a context in which only the
first four moments suffices. These results are obtained by proving a general
carré du champ bound on the distance between laws of random variables in the
domain of a Markov diffusion generator and invariant measures of diffusions.
For elements of a Markov chaos, this bound can be reduced to just the first four
moments.First author draf
Four moments theorems on Markov chaos
We obtain quantitative Four Moments Theorems establishing convergence of the
laws of elements of a Markov chaos to a Pearson distribution, where the only
assumption we make on the Pearson distribution is that it admits four moments.
While in general one cannot use moments to establish convergence to a
heavy-tailed distributions, we provide a context in which only the first four
moments suffices. These results are obtained by proving a general carr\'e du
champ bound on the distance between laws of random variables in the domain of a
Markov diffusion generator and invariant measures of diffusions. For elements
of a Markov chaos, this bound can be reduced to just the first four moments.Comment: 24 page
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