Related papers: Jeffreys priors for mixture estimation: properties…

Bayesian analyses require that all variable model parameters are given a prior probability distribution. This can pose a challenge for analyses where multiple experiments are combined if these experiments use different parametrisations for…

Replication of scientific studies is important for assessing the credibility of their results. However, there is no consensus on how to quantify the extent to which a replication study replicates an original result. We propose a novel…

Observational astrophysics consists of making inferences about the Universe by comparing data and models. The credible intervals placed on model parameters are often as important as the maximum a posteriori probability values, as the…

In many applications, a finite mixture is a natural model, but it can be difficult to choose an appropriate number of components. To circumvent this choice, investigators are increasingly turning to Dirichlet process mixtures (DPMs), and…

Priors are important for achieving proper posteriors with physically meaningful covariance structures for Gaussian random fields (GRFs) since the likelihood typically only provides limited information about the covariance structure under…

Covariance matrix estimation arises in multivariate problems including multivariate normal sampling models and regression models where random effects are jointly modeled, e.g. random-intercept, random-slope models. A Bayesian analysis of…

In this paper, we introduce a new concept for constructing prior distributions. We exploit the natural nested structure inherent to many model components, which defines the model component to be a flexible extension of a base model. Proper…

The Inverse-Wishart (IW) distribution is a standard and popular choice of priors for covariance matrices and has attractive properties such as conditional conjugacy. However, the IW family of priors has crucial drawbacks, including the lack…

Parametric complexity is a central concept in MDL model selection. In practice it often turns out to be infinite, even for quite simple models such as the Poisson and Geometric families. In such cases, MDL model selection as based on NML…

This paper proposes a new method to combine several densities such that each density dominates a separate part of a joint distribution. The method is fully unsupervised, i.e. the parameters in the densities and the thresholds are…

Mixtures of Zellner's g-priors have been studied extensively in linear models and have been shown to have numerous desirable properties for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging. Several extensions of g-priors to Generalized…

A bivariate distribution with continuous margins can be uniquely decomposed via a copula and its marginal distributions. We consider the problem of estimating the copula function and adopt a Bayesian approach. On the space of copula…

In Bayesian machine learning, conjugate priors are popular, mostly due to mathematical convenience. In this paper, we show that there are deeper reasons for choosing a conjugate prior. Specifically, we formulate the conjugate prior in the…

It is a relatively well-known fact that in problems of Bayesian model selection improper priors should, in general, be avoided. In this paper we derive a proper and parsimonious uniform prior for regression coefficients. We then use this…

Previous Bayesian evaluations of the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson (COM-Poisson) distribution have little discussion of non- and weakly-informative priors for the model. While only considering priors with such limited information restricts…

Gibbs-type priors are widely used as key components in several Bayesian nonparametric models. By virtue of their flexibility and mathematical tractability, they turn out to be predominant priors in species sampling problems, clustering and…

Expected-posterior priors (EPP) have been proved to be extremely useful for testing hypothesis on the regression coefficients of normal linear models. One of the advantages of using EPPs is that impropriety of baseline priors causes no…

When constructing a Bayesian Machine Learning model, we might be faced with multiple different prior distributions and thus are required to properly consider them in a sensible manner in our model. While this situation is reasonably well…

Bayesian inferences in high energy physics often use uniform prior distributions for parameters about which little or no information is available before data are collected. The resulting posterior distributions are therefore sensitive to…

We use the language of uninformative Bayesian prior choice to study the selection of appropriately simple effective models. We advocate for the prior which maximizes the mutual information between parameters and predictions, learning as…