Reversible MCMC on Markov equivalence classes of sparse directed acyclic graphs

Graphical models are popular statistical tools which are used to represent dependent or causal complex systems. Statistically equivalent causal or directed graphical models are said to belong to a Markov equivalent class. It is of great interest to describe and understand the space of such classes. However, with currently known algorithms, sampling over such classes is only feasible for graphs with fewer than approximately 20 vertices. In this paper, we design reversible irreducible Markov chains on the space of Markov equivalent classes by proposing a perfect set of operators that determine the transitions of the Markov chain. The stationary distribution of a proposed Markov chain has a closed form and can be computed easily. Specifically, we construct a concrete perfect set of operators on sparse Markov equivalence classes by introducing appropriate conditions on each possible operator. Algorithms and their accelerated versions are provided to efficiently generate Markov chains and to explore properties of Markov equivalence classes of sparse directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with thousands of vertices. We find experimentally that in most Markov equivalence classes of sparse DAGs, (1) most edges are directed, (2) most undirected subgraphs are small and (3) the number of these undirected subgraphs grows approximately linearly with the number of vertices. The article contains supplement arXiv:1303.0632, http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1125SUPPComment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1125 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Te Test: A New Non-asymptotic T-test for Behrens-Fisher Problems

The Behrens-Fisher Problem is a classical statistical problem. It is to test the equality of the means of two normal populations using two independent samples, when the equality of the population variances is unknown. Linnik (1968) has shown that this problem has no exact fixed-level tests based on the complete sufficient statistics. However, exact conventional solutions based on other statistics and approximate solutions based the complete sufficient statistics do exist. Existing methods are mainly asymptotic tests, and usually don't perform well when the variances or sample sizes differ a lot. In this paper, we propose a new method to find an exact t-test (Te) to solve this classical Behrens-Fisher Problem. Confidence intervals for the difference between two means are provided. We also use detailed analysis to show that Te test reaches the maximum of degree of freedom and to give a weak version of proof that Te test has the shortest confidence interval length expectation. Some simulations are performed to show the advantages of our new proposed method compared to available conventional methods like Welch's test, paired t-test and so on. We will also compare it to unconventional method, like two-stage test.Comment: 27 page