## statistics with improper posteriors [or not]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , on March 6, 2019 by xi'an

Last December, Gunnar Taraldsen, Jarle Tufto, and Bo H. Lindqvist arXived a paper on using priors that lead to improper posteriors and [trying to] getting away with it! The central concept in their approach is Rényi’s generalisation of Kolmogorov’s version to define conditional probability distributions from infinite mass measures by conditioning on finite mass measurable sets. A position adopted by Dennis Lindley in his 1964 book .And already discussed in a few ‘Og’s posts. While the theory thus developed indeed allows for the manipulation of improper posteriors, I have difficulties with the inferential aspects of the construct, since one cannot condition on an arbitrary finite measurable set without prior information. Things get a wee bit more outwardly when considering “data” with infinite mass, in Section 4.2, since they cannot be properly normalised (although I find the example of the degenerate multivariate Gaussian distribution puzzling as it is not a matter of improperness, since the degenerate Gaussian has a well-defined density against the right dominating measure).  The paper also discusses marginalisation paradoxes, by acknowledging that marginalisation is no longer feasible with improper quantities. And the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox, with a resolution that uses the sum of the Dirac mass at the null, δ⁰, and of the Lebesgue measure on the real line, λ, as the dominating measure. This indeed solves the issue of the arbitrary constant in the Bayes factor, since it is “the same” on the null hypothesis and elsewhere, but I do not buy the argument, as I see no reason to favour δ⁰+λ over 3.141516 δ⁰+λ or δ⁰+1.61718 λ… (This section 4.5 also illustrates that the choice of the sequence of conditioning sets has an impact on the limiting measure, in the Rényi sense.) In conclusion, after reading the paper, I remain uncertain as to how to exploit this generalisation from an inferential (Bayesian?) viewpoint, since improper posteriors do not clearly lead to well-defined inferential procedures…

## back to the Bayesian Choice

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2018 by xi'an

Surprisingly (or not?!), I received two requests about some exercises from The Bayesian Choice, one from a group of students from McGill having difficulties solving the above, wondering about the properness of the posterior (but missing the integration of x), to whom I sent back this correction. And another one from the Czech Republic about a difficulty with the term “evaluation” by which I meant (pardon my French!) estimation.

## improperties on an astronomical scale

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , on December 15, 2017 by xi'an

As pointed out by Peter Coles on his blog, In the Dark, Hyungsuk Tak, Sujit Ghosh, and Justin Ellis just arXived a review of the unsafe use of improper priors in astronomy papers, 24 out of 75 having failed to establish that the corresponding posteriors are well-defined. And they exhibit such an instance (of impropriety) in a MNRAS paper by Pihajoki (2017), which is a complexification of Gelfand et al. (1990), also used by Jim Hobert in his thesis. (Even though the formal argument used to show the impropriety of the posterior in Pihajoki’s paper does not sound right since it considers divergence at a single value of a parameter β.) Besides repeating this warning about an issue that was rather quickly identified in the infancy of MCMC, if not in the very first publications on the Gibbs sampler, the paper seems to argue against using improper priors due to this potential danger, stating that instead proper priors that include all likely values and beyond are to be preferred. Which reminds me of the BUGS feature of using a N(0,10⁹) prior instead of the flat prior, missing the fact that “very large” variances do impact the resulting inference (if only for the issue of model comparison, remember Lindley-Jeffreys!). And are informative in that sense. However, it is obviously a good idea to advise checking for propriety (!) and using such alternatives may come as a safety button, providing a comparison benchmark to spot possible divergences in the resulting inference.

## Jeffreys priors for mixtures [or not]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , on July 25, 2017 by xi'an

Clara Grazian and I have just arXived [and submitted] a paper on the properties of Jeffreys priors for mixtures of distributions. (An earlier version had not been deemed of sufficient interest by Bayesian Analysis.) In this paper, we consider the formal Jeffreys prior for a mixture of Gaussian distributions and examine whether or not it leads to a proper posterior with a sufficient number of observations.  In general, it does not and hence cannot be used as a reference prior. While this is a negative result (and this is why Bayesian Analysis did not deem it of sufficient importance), I find it definitely relevant because it shows that the default reference prior [in the sense that the Jeffreys prior is the primary choice in nonparametric settings] does not operate in this wide class of distributions. What is surprising is that the use of a Jeffreys-like prior on a global location-scale parameter (as in our 1996 paper with Kerrie Mengersen or our recent work with Kaniav Kamary and Kate Lee) remains legit if proper priors are used on all the other parameters. (This may be yet another illustration of the tequilla-like toxicity of mixtures!)

Francisco Rubio and Mark Steel already exhibited this difficulty of the Jeffreys prior for mixtures of densities with disjoint supports [which reveals the mixture latent variable and hence turns the problem into something different]. Which relates to another point of interest in the paper, derived from a 1988 [Valencià Conference!] paper by José Bernardo and Javier Giròn, where they show the posterior associated with a Jeffreys prior on a mixture is proper when (a) only estimating the weights p and (b) using densities with disjoint supports. José and Javier use in this paper an astounding argument that I had not seen before and which took me a while to ingest and accept. Namely, the Jeffreys prior on a observed model with latent variables is bounded from above by the Jeffreys prior on the corresponding completed model. Hence if the later leads to a proper posterior for the observed data, so does the former. Very smooth, indeed!!!

Actually, we still support the use of the Jeffreys prior but only for the mixture mixtures, because it has the property supported by Judith and Kerrie of a conservative prior about the number of components. Obviously, we cannot advocate its use over all the parameters of the mixture since it then leads to an improper posterior.

## the density that did not exist…

Posted in Kids, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , on January 27, 2015 by xi'an

On Cross Validated, I had a rather extended discussion with a user about a probability density

$f(x_1,x_2)=\left(\dfrac{x_1}{x_2}\right)\left(\dfrac{\alpha}{x_2}\right)^{x_1-1}\exp\left\{-\left(\dfrac{\alpha}{x_2}\right)^{x_1} \right\}\mathbb{I}_{\mathbb{R}^*_+}(x_1,x_2)$

as I thought it could be decomposed in two manageable conditionals and simulated by Gibbs sampling. The first component led to a Gumbel like density

$g(y|x_2)\propto ye^{-y-e^{-y}} \quad\text{with}\quad y=\left(\alpha/x_2 \right)^{x_1}\stackrel{\text{def}}{=}\beta^{x_1}$

wirh y being restricted to either (0,1) or (1,∞) depending on β. The density is bounded and can be easily simulated by an accept-reject step. The second component leads to

$g(t|x_1)\propto \exp\{-\gamma ~ t \}~t^{-{1}/{x_1}} \quad\text{with}\quad t=\dfrac{1}{{x_2}^{x_1}}$

which offers the slight difficulty that it is not integrable when the first component is less than 1! So the above density does not exist (as a probability density).

What I found interesting in this question was that, for once, the Gibbs sampler was the solution rather than the problem, i.e., that it pointed out the lack of integrability of the joint. (What I found less interesting was that the user did not acknowledge a lengthy discussion that we had previously about the Gibbs implementation and that he erased, that he lost interest in the question by not following up on my answer, a seemingly common feature of his‘, and that he did not provide neither source nor motivation for this zombie density.)

## Jeffreys prior with improper posterior

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2014 by xi'an

In a complete coincidence with my visit to Warwick this week, I became aware of the paper “Inference in two-piece location-scale models with Jeffreys priors” recently published in Bayesian Analysis by Francisco Rubio and Mark Steel, both from Warwick. Paper where they exhibit a closed-form Jeffreys prior for the skewed distribution

$\dfrac{2\epsilon}{\sigma_1}f(\{x-\mu\}/\sigma_1)\mathbb{I}_{x<\mu}+\dfrac{2(1-\epsilon)}{\sigma_2}f(\{x-\mu\}/\sigma_2) \mathbb{I}_{x>\mu}$

where f is a symmetric density, namely

$\pi(\mu,\sigma_1,\sigma_2) \propto 1 \big/ \sigma_1\sigma_2\{\sigma_1+\sigma_2\}\,,$

where

$\epsilon=\sigma_1/\{\sigma_1+\sigma_2\}\,.$

only to show  immediately after that this prior does not allow for a proper posterior, no matter what the sample size is. While the above skewed distribution can always be interpreted as a mixture, being a weighted sum of two terms, it is not strictly speaking a mixture, if only because the “component” can be identified from the observation (depending on which side of μ is stands). The likelihood is therefore a product of simple terms rather than a product of a sum of two terms.

As a solution to this conundrum, the authors consider the alternative of the “independent Jeffreys priors”, which are made of a product of conditional Jeffreys priors, i.e., by computing the Jeffreys prior one parameter at a time with all other parameters considered to be fixed. Which differs from the reference prior, of course, but would have been my second choice as well. Despite criticisms expressed by José Bernardo in the discussion of the paper… The difficulty (in my opinion) resides in the choice (and difficulty) of the parameterisation of the model, since those priors are not parameterisation-invariant. (Xinyi Xu makes the important comment that even those priors incorporate strong if hidden information. Which relates to our earlier discussion with Kaniav Kamari on the “dangers” of prior modelling.)

Although the outcome is puzzling, I remain just slightly sceptical of the income, namely Jeffreys prior and the corresponding Fisher information: the fact that the density involves an indicator function and is thus discontinuous in the location μ at the observation x makes the likelihood function not differentiable and hence the derivation of the Fisher information not strictly valid. Since the indicator part cannot be differentiated. Not that I am seeing the Jeffreys prior as the ultimate grail for non-informative priors, far from it, but there is definitely something specific in the discontinuity in the density. (In connection with the later point, Weiss and Suchard deliver a highly critical commentary on the non-need for reference priors and the preference given to a non-parametric Bayes primary analysis. Maybe making the point towards a greater convergence of the two perspectives, objective Bayes and non-parametric Bayes.)

This paper and the ensuing discussion about the properness of the Jeffreys posterior reminded me of our earliest paper on the topic with Jean Diebolt. Where we used improper priors on location and scale parameters but prohibited allocations (in the Gibbs sampler) that would lead to less than two observations per components, thereby ensuring that the (truncated) posterior was well-defined. (This feature also remained in the Series B paper, submitted at the same time, namely mid-1990, but only published in 1994!)  Larry Wasserman proved ten years later that this truncation led to consistent estimators, but I had not thought about it in very long while. I still like this notion of forcing some (enough) datapoints into each component for an allocation (of the latent indicator variables) to be an acceptable Gibbs move. This is obviously not compatible with the iid representation of a mixture model, but it expresses the requirement that components all have a meaning in terms of the data, namely that all components contributed to generating a part of the data. This translates as a form of weak prior information on how much we trust the model and how meaningful each component is (in opposition to adding meaningless extra-components with almost zero weights or almost identical parameters).

As a marginalia, the insistence in Rubio and Steel’s paper that all observations in the sample be different also reminded me of a discussion I wrote for one of the Valencia proceedings (Valencia 6 in 1998) where Mark presented a paper with Carmen Fernández on this issue of handling duplicated observations modelled by absolutely continuous distributions. (I am afraid my discussion is not worth the \$250 price tag given by amazon!)