Bayesian brittleness

Here is the abstract of a recently arXived paper that attracted my attention:

Although it is known that Bayesian estimators may be inconsistent if the model is misspecified, it is also a popular belief that a “good” or “close” enough model should have good convergence properties. This paper shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a “close enough” model in Bayesian inference in the following sense: we derive optimal lower and upper bounds on posterior values obtained from models that exactly capture an arbitrarily large number of finite-dimensional marginals of the data-generating distribution and/or that are arbitrarily close to the data-generating distribution in the Prokhorov or total variation metrics; these bounds show that such models may still make the largest possible prediction error after conditioning on an arbitrarily large number of sample data. Therefore, under model misspecification, and without stronger assumptions than (arbitrary) closeness in Prokhorov or total variation metrics, Bayesian inference offers no better guarantee of accuracy than arbitrarily picking a value between the essential infimum and supremum of the quantity of interest. In particular, an unscrupulous practitioner could slightly perturb a given prior and model to achieve any desired posterior conclusions.ink

The paper is both too long and too theoretical for me to get into it deep enough. The main point however is that, given the space of all possible measures, the set of (parametric) Bayes inferences constitutes a tiny finite-dimensional set that may lie far far away from the true model. I do not find the result unreasonable, far from it!, but the fact that Bayesian (and other) inferences may be inconsistent for most misspecified models is not such a major issue in my opinion. (Witness my post on the Robins-Wasserman paradox.) I am not so much convinced either about this “popular belief that a “good” or “close” enough model should have good convergence properties”, as it is intuitively reasonable that the immensity of the space of all models can induce non-convergent behaviours. The statistical question is rather what can be done about it. Does it matter that the model is misspecified? If it does, is there any meaning in estimating parameters without a model? For a finite sample size, should we at all bother that the model is not “right” or “close enough” if discrepancies cannot be detected at this precision level? I think the answer to all those questions is negative and that we should proceed with our imperfect models and imperfect inference as long as our imperfect simulation tools do not exhibit strong divergences.