English

The Bernstein-von Mises theorem for Semiparametric Mixtures

Statistics Theory 2024-12-03 v1 Statistics Theory

Abstract

Semiparametric mixture models are parametric models with latent variables. They are defined kernel, pθ(xz)p_\theta(x | z), where z is the unknown latent variable, and θ\theta is the parameter of interest. We assume that the latent variables are an i.i.d. sample from some mixing distribution FF. A Bayesian would put a prior on the pair (θ,F)(\theta, F). We prove consistency for these models in fair generality and then study efficiency. We first prove an abstract Semiparametric Bernstein-von Mises theorem, and then provide tools to verify the assumptions. We use these tools to study the efficiency for estimating θ\theta in the frailty model and the errors in variables model in the case were we put a generic prior on θ\theta and a species sampling process prior on FF.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.00219,
  title  = {The Bernstein-von Mises theorem for Semiparametric Mixtures},
  author = {Stefan Franssen and Jeanne Nguyen and Aad van der Vaart},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.00219},
  year   = {2024}
}