Bayesian DAG Structure Learning with Simultaneous Shrinkage Covariance Estimation under Scale-Mixture Error Distributions in the Proportional High-Dimensional Regime
Abstract
We propose a unified Bayesian framework namely robust DAG-Cholesky horseshoe (R-DACH) for joint directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure learning and precision matrix estimation in the high-dimensional proportional asymptotic regime , under the scale mixture of normal errors. The construction places a global-local horseshoe-type prior directly on the strictly lower-triangular entries of the modified Cholesky factor of the DAG-Markov precision matrix, so that sparsity in the Cholesky parameters induces a coherent parent-set selection consistent with a topological ordering of the variables. A per-observation inverse-gamma scale mixture yields automatic robustness to heavy-tailed and contaminated observations and admits Student-, Laplace, and slash distributions as special cases. We design a partially-collapsed blocked Gibbs sampler that traverses the joint space of orderings, sparsity patterns and continuous parameters. Simulations across configurations with up to several hundreds confirm the theoretical rates and demonstrate substantial gains over graphical-horseshoe, DAG-Wishart, and PC-based competitors under contamination. An application to RNA-seq gene-expression data from \emph{The Cancer Genome Atlas} reveals biologically interpretable regulatory structure that competing methods fail to recover.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.08428,
title = {Bayesian DAG Structure Learning with Simultaneous Shrinkage Covariance Estimation under Scale-Mixture Error Distributions in the Proportional High-Dimensional Regime},
author = {Samaneh Nazari and Mohammad Arashi and Abdolnasser Sadeghkhani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08428},
year = {2026}
}