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Small area estimation (SAE) is a common endeavor and is used in a variety of disciplines. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), in which household surveys provide the most reliable and timely source of data, SAE is vital for…
In regression models involving economic variables such as income, log transformation is typically taken to achieve approximate normality and stabilize the variance. However, often the interest is predicting individual values or means of the…
When doing impact evaluation and making causal inferences, it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the treatment effects for different domains (geographic, socio-demographic, or socio-economic). If the domain of interest is…
Non-linear hierarchical models are commonly used in many disciplines. However, inference in the presence of non-nested effects and on large datasets is challenging and computationally burdensome. This paper provides two contributions to…
This paper is concerned with the small area estimation in the multivariate Fay-Herriot model where covariance matrix of random effects are fully unknown. The covariance matrix is estimated by a Prasad-Rao type consistent estimator, and the…
Estimation of covariance matrices or their inverses plays a central role in many statistical methods. For these methods to work reliably, estimated matrices must not only be invertible but also well-conditioned. In this paper we present an…
Mean field variational Bayes (MFVB) is a popular posterior approximation method due to its fast runtime on large-scale data sets. However, it is well known that a major failing of MFVB is that it underestimates the uncertainty of model…
Benchmarking estimation and its risk evaluation is a practically important issue in small area estimation. While Bayesian methods have been widely adopted in small area estimation, existing benchmarking approaches are often ad-hoc, such as…
We study the properties of variational Bayes approximations for exponential family models with missing values. It is shown that the iterative algorithm for obtaining the variational Bayesian estimator converges locally to the true value…
Estimating characteristics of domains (referred to as small areas) within a population from sample surveys of the population is an important problem in survey statistics. In this paper, we consider model-based small area estimation under…
This paper is a follow-up to Maruyama and Strawderman (2006, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference), which identified a new class of generalized Bayes estimators with a particularly simple form for estimating a normal variance under…
Consider the problem of estimating a multivariate normal mean with a known variance matrix, which is not necessarily proportional to the identity matrix. The coordinates are shrunk directly in proportion to their variances in Efron and…
Shrinkage estimation usually reduces variance at the cost of bias. But when we care only about some parameters of a model, I show that we can reduce variance without incurring bias if we have additional information about the distribution of…
A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson & Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with…
Random effects model can account for the lack of fitting a regression model and increase precision of estimating area-level means. However, in case that the synthetic mean provides accurate estimates, the prior distribution may inflate an…
We consider Empirical Bayes (EB) estimation in the normal means problem, when the standard deviations of the observations are not known precisely, but estimated with error -- which is almost always the case in practical applications. In…
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular class of deep generative models with many variants and a wide range of applications. Improvements upon the standard VAE mostly focus on the modelling of the posterior distribution over the…
Inverse problems aim to determine model parameters of a mathematical problem from given observational data. Neural networks can provide an efficient tool to solve these problems. In the context of Bayesian inverse problems, Uncertainty…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for Bayesian posterior inference. Though popular, VB comes with few theoretical guarantees, most of which focus on well-specified models. However, models…
In this article we provide some nonnegative and positive estimators of the mean squared errors(MSEs) for shrinkage estimators of multivariate normal means. Proposed estimators are shown to improve on the uniformly minimum variance unbiased…