Consistency of Bayes factor for nonnested model selection when the model dimension grows

Zellner's $g$-prior is a popular prior choice for the model selection problems in the context of normal regression models. Wang and Sun [J. Statist. Plann. Inference 147 (2014) 95-105] recently adopt this prior and put a special hyper-prior for $g$, which results in a closed-form expression of Bayes factor for nested linear model comparisons. They have shown that under very general conditions, the Bayes factor is consistent when two competing models are of order $O(n^{\tau})$ for $\tau <1$ and for $\tau=1$ is almost consistent except a small inconsistency region around the null hypothesis. In this paper, we study Bayes factor consistency for nonnested linear models with a growing number of parameters. Some of the proposed results generalize the ones of the Bayes factor for the case of nested linear models. Specifically, we compare the asymptotic behaviors between the proposed Bayes factor and the intrinsic Bayes factor in the literature.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/15-BEJ720 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Bayesian predictive densities for linear regression models under alpha-divergence loss: some results and open problems

This paper considers estimation of the predictive density for a normal linear model with unknown variance under alpha-divergence loss for -1 <= alpha <= 1. We first give a general canonical form for the problem, and then give general expressions for the generalized Bayes solution under the above loss for each alpha. For a particular class of hierarchical generalized priors studied in Maruyama and Strawderman (2005, 2006) for the problems of estimating the mean vector and the variance respectively, we give the generalized Bayes predictive density. Additionally, we show that, for a subclass of these priors, the resulting estimator dominates the generalized Bayes estimator with respect to the right invariant prior when alpha=1, i.e., the best (fully) equivariant minimax estimator