# Statisfaction

## MathSciNet reviews on Bayesian papers

Posted in General by Julyan Arbel on 18 October 2016

I recently started to review papers on Mathematical Reviews / MathSciNet a decided I would post the reviews here from time to time. Here are the first three which deal with (i) objective Bayes priors for discrete parameters, (ii) random probability measures and inference on species variety and (iii) Bayesian nonparametric asymptotic theory and contraction rates.

The paper deals with objective prior derivation in the discrete parameter setting. Previous treatment of this problem includes J. O. Berger, J.-M. Bernardo and D. Sun [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 107 (2012), no. 498, 636–648; MR2980073] who rely on embedding the discrete parameter into a continuous parameter space and then applying reference methodology (J.-M. Bernardo [J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 41 (1979), no. 2, 113–147; MR0547240]). The main contribution here is to propose an all purpose objective prior based on the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence. More specifically, the prior $\pi(\theta)$ at any parameter value $\theta$ is obtained as follows: (i) compute the minimum KL divergence over $\theta'\neq \theta$ between models indexed by $\theta'$ and $\theta$; (ii) set $\pi(\theta)$ proportional to a sound transform of the minimum obtained in (i). A good property of the proposed approach is that it is not problem specific. This objective prior is derived in five models (including binomial and hypergeometric) and is compared to the priors known in the literature. The discussion suggests possible extension to the continuous parameter setting.

A. Lijoi, R. H. Mena and I. Prünster [Biometrika 94 (2007), no. 4, 769–786; MR2416792] recently introduced a Bayesian nonparametric methodology for estimating the species variety featured by an additional unobserved sample of size $m$ given an initial observed sample. This methodology was further investigated by S. Favaro, Lijoi and Prünster [Biometrics 68 (2012), no. 4, 1188–1196; MR3040025; Ann. Appl. Probab. 23 (2013), no. 5, 1721–1754; MR3114915]. Although it led to explicit posterior distributions under the general framework of Gibbs-type priors [A. V. Gnedin and J. W. Pitman (2005), Teor. Predst. Din. Sist. Komb. i Algoritm. Metody. 12, 83–102, 244–245;MR2160320], there are situations of practical interest where $m$ is required to be very large and the computational burden for evaluating these posterior distributions makes impossible their concrete implementation. This paper presents a solution to this problem for a large class of Gibbs-type priors which encompasses the two parameter Poisson-Dirichlet prior and, among others, the normalized generalized Gamma prior. The solution relies on the study of the large $m$ asymptotic behaviour of the posterior distribution of the number of new species in the additional sample. In particular a simple characterization of the limiting posterior distribution is introduced in terms of a scale mixture with respect to a suitable latent random variable; this characterization, combined with the adaptive rejection sampling, leads to derive a large $m$ approximation of any feature of interest from the exact posterior distribution. The results are implemented through a simulation study and the analysis of a dataset in linguistics.

A novel prior distribution is proposed for adaptive Bayesian estimation, meaning that the associated posterior distribution contracts to the truth with the exact optimal rate and at the same time is adaptive regardless of the unknown smoothness. The prior is termed \textit{block prior} and is defined on the Fourier coefficients $\{\theta_j\}$ of a curve $f$ by independently assigning 0-mean Gaussian distributions on blocks of coefficients $\{\theta_j\}_{j\in B_k}$ indexed by some $B_k$, with covariance matrix proportional to the identity matrix; the proportional coefficient is itself assigned a prior distribution $g_k$. Under conditions on $g_k$, it is shown that (i) the prior puts sufficient prior mass near the true signal and (ii) automatically concentrates on its effective dimension. The main result of the paper is a rate-optimal posterior contraction theorem obtained in a general framework for a modified version of a block prior. Compared to the closely related block spike and slab prior proposed by M. Hoffmann, J. Rousseau and J. Schmidt-Hieber [Ann. Statist. 43 (2015), no. 5, 2259–2295; MR3396985] which only holds for the white noise model, the present result can be applied in a wide range of models. This is illustrated through applications to five mainstream models: density estimation, white noise model, Gaussian sequence model, Gaussian regression and spectral density estimation. The results hold under Sobolev smoothness and their extension to more flexible Besov smoothness is discussed. The paper also provides a discussion on the absence of an extra log term in the posterior contraction rates (thus achieving the exact minimax rate) with a comparison to other priors commonly used in the literature. These include rescaled Gaussian processes [A. W. van der Vaart and H. van Zanten, Electron. J. Stat. 1 (2007), 433–448; MR2357712; Ann. Statist. 37 (2009), no. 5B, 2655–2675; MR2541442] and sieve priors [V. Rivoirard and J. Rousseau, Bayesian Anal. 7 (2012), no. 2, 311–333; MR2934953; J. Arbel, G. Gayraud and J. Rousseau, Scand. J. Stat. 40 (2013), no. 3, 549–570; MR3091697].