English

Weyl Prior and Bayesian Statistics

Differential Geometry 2020-05-20 v1

Abstract

When using Bayesian inference, one needs to choose a prior distribution for parameters. The well-known Jeffreys prior is based on the Riemann metric tensor on a statistical manifold. Takeuchi and Amari defined the α\alpha-parallel prior,, which generalized the Jeffreys prior by exploiting higher-order geometric object, known as Chentsov-Amari tensor. In this paper, we propose a new prior based on the Weyl structure on a statistical manifold. It turns out that our prior is a special case of the α\alpha-parallel prior with the parameter α\alpha equals n-n, where nn is the dimension of the underlying statistical manifold and the minus sign is a result of conventions used in the definition of α\alpha-connections. This makes the choice for the parameter α\alpha more canonical. We calculated the Weyl prior for univariate Gaussian and multivariate Gaussian distribution. The Weyl prior of the univariate Gaussian turns out to be the uniform prior.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.05697,
  title  = {Weyl Prior and Bayesian Statistics},
  author = {Ruichao Jiang and Javad Tavakoli and Yiqiang Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.05697},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

13 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:48:44.503Z