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Related papers: Synthetic Priors

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Uncertainty quantification is central to many applications of causal machine learning, yet principled Bayesian inference for causal effects remains challenging. Standard Bayesian approaches typically require specifying a probabilistic model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Emil Javurek , Dennis Frauen , Yuxin Wang , Stefan Feuerriegel

The power-expected-posterior (PEP) prior provides an objective, automatic, consistent and parsimonious model selection procedure. At the same time it resolves the conceptual and computational problems due to the use of imaginary data.…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-02 Dimitris Fouskakis , Ioannis Ntzoufras , Konstantinos Perrakis

Asymptotically unbiased priors, introduced by Hartigan (1965), are designed to achieve second-order unbiasedness of Bayes estimators. This paper extends Hartigan's framework to non-i.i.d. models by deriving a system of partial differential…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-15 Mana Sakai , Takeru Matsuda , Tatsuya Kubokawa

In a bivariate meta-analysis the number of diagnostic studies involved is often very low so that frequentist methods may result in problems. Bayesian inference is attractive as informative priors that add small amount of information can…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-12-22 Jingyi Guo , Håvard Rue , Andrea Riebler

We consider the Bayesian analysis of a few complex, high-dimensional models and show that intuitive priors, which are not tailored to the fine details of the model and the estimated parameters, produce estimators which perform poorly in…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-02-02 Y. Ritov , P. J. Bickel , A. C. Gamst , B. J. K. Kleijn

Bayesian inference for statistical models with a hierarchical structure is often characterized by specification of priors for parameters at different levels of the hierarchy. When higher level parameters are functions of the lower level…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-02-04 Ken B. Newman , Cristiano Villa , Ruth King

We marshall the arguments for preferring Bayesian hypothesis testing and confidence sets to frequentist ones. We define admissible solutions to inference problems, noting that Bayesian solutions are admissible. We give seven weaker…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-05-22 Roger Sewell

The random dot product graph is a popular model for network data with extensions that accommodate dynamic (time-varying) networks. However, two significant deficiencies exist in the dynamic random dot product graph literature: (1) no…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-25 Joshua Daniel Loyal

We study the stability of posterior predictive inferences to the specification of the likelihood model and perturbations of the data generating process. In modern big data analyses, useful broad structural judgements may be elicited from…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-30 Jack Jewson , Jim Q. Smith , Chris Holmes

Bayesian synthetic likelihood is a widely used approach for conducting Bayesian analysis in complex models where evaluation of the likelihood is infeasible but simulation from the assumed model is tractable. We analyze the behaviour of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-17 David T. Frazier , Christopher Drovandi , David J. Nott

The ongoing unprecedented exponential explosion of available computing power, has radically transformed the methods of statistical inference. What used to be a small minority of statisticians advocating for the use of priors and a strict…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-11-07 Carlos C. Rodriguez

We propose a new method for conducting Bayesian prediction that delivers accurate predictions without correctly specifying the unknown true data generating process. A prior is defined over a class of plausible predictive models. After…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-24 Ruben Loaiza-Maya , Gael M. Martin , David T. Frazier

Generalized Bayesian Inference (GBI) tempers a loss with a temperature $\beta > 0$ to mitigate overconfidence and improve robustness under model misspecification, but existing GBI methods typically rely on costly MCMC or SDE-based samplers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-25 Shiyi Sun , Geoff K. Nicholls , Jeong Eun Lee

Motivated by parametric models for which the likelihood is analytically unavailable, numerically unstable, or prohibitively expensive to compute or optimize, we develop a prior- and likelihood-free framework for fully probabilistic…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-03-17 Leonardo Cella , Emily C. Hector

Hybrid mechanistic models, physical priors with learned residuals, promise to reduce the data required for good decisions, but have no computable criterion to test this. We characterize the value of mechanistic priors in sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Itai Shufaro , Gal Benor , Shie Mannor

Loss-based updating, including generalized Bayes, Gibbs, and quasi-posteriors, replaces likelihoods by a user-chosen loss and produces a posterior-like distribution via exponential tilt. We give a decision-theoretic characterization that…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kenichiro McAlinn , Kōsaku Takanashi

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) encompass large class of statistical models, with a vast range of applications areas. GLMM extends the linear mixed models allowing for different types of response variable. Three most common data…

Applications · Statistics 2017-04-25 Wagner Hugo Bonat , Paulo Justiniano Ribeiro , Silvia emiko Shimakura

The problem of joint estimation of multiple graphical models from high dimensional data has been studied in the statistics and machine learning literature, due to its importance in diverse fields including molecular biology, neuroscience…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-07-04 Peyman Jalali , Kshitij Khare , George Michailidis

In many hypothesis testing applications, we have mixed priors, with well-motivated informative priors for some parameters but not for others. The Bayesian methodology uses the Bayes factor and is helpful for the informative priors, as it…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-10-05 Jakob Robnik , Uroš Seljak

Priors in Bayesian analyses often encode informative domain knowledge that can be useful in making the inference process more efficient. Occasionally, however, priors may be unrepresentative of the parameter values for a given dataset,…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-05 Xi Chen , Farhan Feroz , Michael Hobson