Daniel Simpson gave a seminar at CREST yesterday on his recently arXived paper, “Penalising model component complexity: A principled, practical approach to constructing priors” written with Thiago Martins, Andrea Riebler, Håvard Rue, and Sigrunn Sørbye. Paper that he should also have given in Banff last month had he not lost his passport in København airport… I have already commented at length on this exciting paper, hopefully to become a discussion paper in a top journal!, so I am just pointing out two things that came to my mind during the energetic talk delivered by Dan to our group. The first thing is that those penalised complexity (PC) priors of theirs rely on some choices in the ordering of the relevance, complexity, nuisance level, &tc. of the parameters, just like reference priors. While Dan already wrote a paper on Russian roulette, there is also a Russian doll principle at work behind (or within) PC priors. Each shell of the Russian doll corresponds to a further level of complexity whose order need be decided by the modeller… Not very realistic in a hierarchical model with several types of parameters having only local meaning.
My second point is that the construction of those “politically correct” (PC) priors reflects another Russian doll structure, namely one of embedded models, hence would and should lead to a natural multiple testing methodology. Except that Dan rejected this notion during his talk, by being opposed to testing per se. (A good topic for one of my summer projects, if nothing more, then!)
As I was flying over Skye (with [maybe] a first if hazy perspective on the Cuillin ridge!) to Iceland, three long sets of replies to some of my posts appeared on the ‘Og:
