On adaptive Bayesian inference

We study the rate of Bayesian consistency for hierarchical priors consisting of prior weights on a model index set and a prior on a density model for each choice of model index. Ghosal, Lember and Van der Vaart [2] have obtained general in-probability theorems on the rate of convergence of the resulting posterior distributions. We extend their results to almost sure assertions. As an application we study log spline densities with a finite number of models and obtain that the Bayes procedure achieves the optimal minimax rate $n^{-\gamma/(2\gamma+1)}$ of convergence if the true density of the observations belongs to the H\"{o}lder space $C^{\gamma}[0,1]$. This strengthens a result in [1; 2]. We also study consistency of posterior distributions of the model index and give conditions ensuring that the posterior distributions concentrate their masses near the index of the best model.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-EJS244 the Electronic Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills on Conic Space as Hologram of STU Topological Black Hole

We construct four-dimensional N=4 super-Yang-Mills theories on a conic sphere with various background R-symmetry gauge fields. We study free energy and supersymmetric Renyi entropy using heat kernel method as well as localization technique. We find that the universal contribution to the partition function in the free field limit is the same as that in the strong coupling limit, which implies that it may be protected by supersymmetry. Based on the fact that, the conic sphere can be conformally mapped to $S^1\times H^3$ and the R-symmetry background fields can be supported by the R-charges of black hole, we propose that the holographic dual of these theories are five-dimensional, supersymmetric STU topological black holes. We demonstrate perfect agreement between N=4 super-Yang-Mills theories in the planar limit and the STU topological black holes.Comment: 1+48 pages, v2:typo fixed+references adde