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Marginal likelihoods for finite-support Huber contamination

Methodology 2026-05-27 v1 Statistics Theory Computation Statistics Theory

Abstract

For Huber contamination on a known finite sample space, the unrestricted contaminating law is a probability vector on the support atoms, and domination over all measurable subsets reduces to atomwise inequalities. Placing a Dirichlet prior on this probability vector and a Beta prior on the contamination proportion gives an exact marginal likelihood for the structural parameter after analytic integration of both nuisance quantities. The likelihood is a finite weighted sum over allocations of the observed counts between the structural and contaminating components. For fixed support size, this sum and its score can be evaluated by a dynamic program with quadratic cost in the sample size, enabling gradient-based posterior sampling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26723,
  title  = {Marginal likelihoods for finite-support Huber contamination},
  author = {Jaehoan Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26723},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:34:08.037Z