English

Safe-Bayesian Generalized Linear Regression

Statistics Theory 2021-06-01 v3 Machine Learning Methodology Statistics Theory

Abstract

We study generalized Bayesian inference under misspecification, i.e. when the model is 'wrong but useful'. Generalized Bayes equips the likelihood with a learning rate η\eta. We show that for generalized linear models (GLMs), η\eta-generalized Bayes concentrates around the best approximation of the truth within the model for specific η1\eta \neq 1, even under severely misspecified noise, as long as the tails of the true distribution are exponential. We derive MCMC samplers for generalized Bayesian lasso and logistic regression and give examples of both simulated and real-world data in which generalized Bayes substantially outperforms standard Bayes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.09227,
  title  = {Safe-Bayesian Generalized Linear Regression},
  author = {Rianne de Heide and Alisa Kirichenko and Nishant Mehta and Peter Grünwald},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09227},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Final version. Accepted to AISTATS 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:49:34.418Z