Empirical Bayes block shrinkage for wavelet regression

Abstract

There has been great interest in recent years in the development of wavelet methods for estimating an unknown function observed in the presence of noise, following the pioneering work of Donoho and Johnstone (1994, 1995) and Donoho et al. (1995). In this thesis, a novel empirical Bayes block (EBB) shrinkage procedure is proposed and the performance of this approach with both independent identically distributed (IID) noise and correlated noise is thoroughly explored. The first part of this thesis develops a Bayesian methodology involving the non-central X[superscript]2 distribution to simultaneously shrink wavelet coefficients in a block, based on the block sum of squares. A useful (and to the best of our knowledge, new) identity satisfied by the non-central X[superscript]2 density is exploited. This identity leads to tractable posterior calculations for suitable families of prior distributions. Also, the families of prior distribution we work with are sufficiently flexible to represent various forms of prior knowledge. Furthermore, an efficient method for finding the hyperparameters is implemented and simulations show that this method has a high degree of computational advantage. The second part relaxes the assumption of IID noise considered in the first part of this thesis. A semi-parametric model including a parametric component and a nonparametric component is presented to deal with correlated noise situations. In the parametric component, attention is paid to the covariance structure of the noise. Two distinct parametric methods (maximum likelihood estimation and time series model identification techniques) for estimating the parameters in the covariance matrix are investigated. Both methods have been successfully implemented and are believed to be new additions to smoothing methods