Thesis defense in València

On Monday, I took part in the jury of the PhD thesis of Anabel Forte Deltel, in the department of statistics of the Universitat de València. The topic of the thesis was variable selection in Gaussian linear models using an objective Bayes approach. Completely on my own research agenda! I had already discussed with Anabel in Zürich, where she gave a poster and gave me a copy of her thesis, so could concentrate on the fundamentals of her approach during the defense. Her approach extends Liang et al. (2008, JASA) hyper-g prior in a complete analysis of the conditions set by Jeffreys in his book for constructing such priors. She is therefore able to motivate a precise value for most hyperparameters (although some choices were mainly based on computational reasons opposing ₂F₁ with Appell’s F₁ hypergeometric functions). She also defends the use of an improper prior by an invariance argument that leads to the standard Jeffreys’ prior on location-scale. (This is where I prefer the approach in Bayesian Core that does not discriminate between a subset of the covariates including the intercept and the other covariates. Even though it is not invariant by location-scale transforms.) After the defence, Jim Berger pointed out to me that the modelling allowed for the subset to be empty, which would then cancel my above objection! In conclusion, this thesis could well set a reference prior (if not in José Bernardo’s sense of the term!) for Bayesian linear model analysis in the coming years.

An additional bonus of attending a thesis in València is that one can sample excellent local rice dishes, from the traditional paella to the creamier senoret rice, and equally excellent local wines, a superb discovery being the mestizaje (metissage)!