Related papers: Jeffreys priors for mixture estimation: properties…
While Jeffreys priors usually are well-defined for the parameters of mixtures of distributions, they are not available in closed form. Furthermore, they often are improper priors. Hence, they have never been used to draw inference on the…
To include parameter uncertainty into probabilistic climate forecasts one must first specify a prior. We advocate the use of objective priors, and, in particular, the Jeffreys' Prior. In previous work we have derived expressions for the…
We derive the Jeffreys prior for the parameter of the Multivariate Ewens Distribution and study some of its properties. In particular, we show that this prior is proper and has no finite moments. We also investigate the impact of this…
Objective probabilistic forecasts of future climate that include parameter uncertainty can be made by using the Bayesian prediction integral with the prior set to Jeffreys' Prior. The calculations involved in determining the prior can then…
This paper deals with Bayesian inference of a mixture of Gaussian distributions. A novel formulation of the mixture model is introduced, which includes the prior constraint that each Gaussian component is always assigned a minimal number of…
Inference from limited data requires a notion of measure on parameter space, most explicit in the Bayesian framework as a prior. Here we demonstrate that Jeffreys prior, the best-known uninformative choice, introduces enormous bias when…
Bayesian parameter inference depends on a choice of prior probability distribution for the parameters in question. The prior which makes the posterior distribution maximally sensitive to data is called the Jeffreys prior, and it is…
Hierarchical modeling is wonderful and here to stay, but hyperparameter priors are often chosen in a casual fashion. Unfortunately, as the number of hyperparameters grows, the effects of casual choices can multiply, leading to considerably…
We argue that it would be desirable to use Jeffreys' priors in the construction of numerical model based probabilistic climate forecasts, in order that those forecasts could be argued to be objective. Hitherto, this has been considered…
The use of improper priors in the context of Bayesian hierarchical linear mixed models has been studied under the assumption of normality of the random effects. We study the propriety of the posterior under more flexible distributional…
I review the problem of the choice of the priors from the point of view of a physicist interested in measuring a physical quantity, and I try to show that the reference priors often recommended for the purpose (Jeffreys priors) do not fit…
We propose a prior distribution for the number of components of a finite mixture model. The novelty is that the prior distribution is obtained by considering the loss one would incur if the true value representing the number of components…
We study the Jeffreys prior of the skewness parameter of a general class of scalar skew--symmetric models. It is shown that this prior is symmetric about 0, proper, and with tails $O(\lambda^{-3/2})$ under mild regularity conditions. We…
Prior distributions elicited for modelling the natural fluctuations or the uncertainty on parameters of Bayesian fishery population models, can be chosen among a vast range of statistical laws. Since the statistical framework is defined by…
We propose a two-component mixture of a noninformative (diffuse) and an informative prior distribution, weighted through the data in such a way to prefer the first component if a prior-data conflict arises. The data-driven approach for…
We study posterior contraction behaviors for parameters of interest in the context of Bayesian mixture modeling, where the number of mixing components is unknown while the model itself may or may not be correctly specified. Two…
In this paper we show that combination of the minimum description length principle and a exchange-ability condition leads directly to the use of Jeffreys prior. This approach works in most cases even when Jeffreys prior cannot be…
The Generalized Pareto (GP) and Generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions play an important role in extreme value analyses, as models for threshold excesses and block maxima respectively. For each of these distributions we consider…
Motivated by the statistical evaluation of complex computer models, we deal with the issue of objective prior specification for the parameters of Gaussian processes. In particular, we derive the Jeffreys-rule, independence Jeffreys and…
In this paper we introduce objective proper prior distributions for hypothesis testing and model selection based on measures of divergence between the competing models; we call them divergence based (DB) priors. DB priors have simple forms…