English

Censored Graphical Horseshoe: Bayesian sparse precision matrix estimation with censored and missing data

Methodology 2026-01-13 v1 Statistics Theory Computation Statistics Theory

Abstract

Gaussian graphical models provide a powerful framework for studying conditional dependencies in multivariate data, with widespread applications spanning biomedical, environmental sciences, and other data-rich scientific domains. While the Graphical Horseshoe (GHS) method has emerged as a state-of-the-art Bayesian method for sparse precision matrix estimation, existing approaches assume fully observed data and thus fail in the presence of censoring or missingness, which are pervasive in real-world studies. In this paper, we develop the Censored Graphical Horseshoe (CGHS), a novel Bayesian framework that extends the GHS to censored and arbitrarily missing Gaussian data. By introducing a latent-variable representation, CGHS accommodates incomplete observations while retaining the adaptive global-local shrinkage properties of the Horseshoe prior. We derive efficient Gibbs samplers for posterior computation and establish new theoretical results on posterior behavior under censoring and missingness, filling a gap not addressed by frequentist Lasso-based methods. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that CGHS consistently improves estimation accuracy compared to penalized likelihood approaches. Our methods are implemented in the package GHScenmis available on Github: https://github.com/tienmt/ghscenmis .

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06671,
  title  = {Censored Graphical Horseshoe: Bayesian sparse precision matrix estimation with censored and missing data},
  author = {The Tien Mai and Sayantan Banerjee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06671},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:59:09.646Z