English

Minimaxity under the half-Cauchy prior

Statistics Theory 2024-06-14 v1 Statistics Theory

Abstract

This is a follow-up paper of Polson and Scott (2012, Bayesian Analysis), which claimed that the half-Cauchy prior is a sensible default prior for a scale parameter in hierarchical models. For estimation of a p-variate normal mean under the quadratic loss, they demonstrated that the Bayes estimator with respect to the half-Cauchy prior seems to be minimax through numerical experiments. In this paper, we theoretically establish the minimaxity of the corresponding Bayes estimator using the interval arithmetric.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.08892,
  title  = {Minimaxity under the half-Cauchy prior},
  author = {Yuzo Maruyama and Takeru Matsuda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.08892},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

The title of this article is quite similar to that of our previous article on arXiv 2308.09339, in which we discussed some variants of the half-Cauchy prior. In this article, we focus on the half-Cauchy prior itself

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:04:12.735Z