English

Concentration rate and consistency of the posterior under monotonicity constraints

Statistics Theory 2015-02-20 v3 Statistics Theory

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the well known problem of estimating a density function under qualitative assumptions. More precisely, we estimate monotone non increasing densities in a Bayesian setting and derive concentration rate for the posterior distribution for a Dirichlet process and finite mixture prior. We prove that the posterior distribution based on both priors concentrates at the rate (n/log(n))1/3(n/\log(n))^{-1/3}, which is the minimax rate of estimation up to a \log(n)$ factor. We also study the behaviour of the posterior for the point-wise loss at any fixed point of the support the density and for the sup norm. We prove that the posterior is consistent for both losses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1301.1898,
  title  = {Concentration rate and consistency of the posterior under monotonicity constraints},
  author = {Jean-Bernard Salomond},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.1898},
  year   = {2015}
}