No Arabic abstract
Bayesian methods are developed for the multivariate nonparametric regression problem where the domain is taken to be a compact Riemannian manifold. In terms of the latter, the underlying geometry of the manifold induces certain symmetries on the multivariate nonparametric regression function. The Bayesian approach then allows one to incorporate hierarchical Bayesian methods directly into the spectral structure, thus providing a symmetry-adaptive multivariate Bayesian function estimator. One can also diffuse away some prior information in which the limiting case is a smoothing spline on the manifold. This, together with the result that the smoothing spline solution obtains the minimax rate of convergence in the multivariate nonparametric regression problem, provides good frequentist properties for the Bayes estimators. An application to astronomy is included.
This paper studies nonparametric estimation of parameters of multivariate Hawkes processes. We consider the Bayesian setting and derive posterior concentration rates. First rates are derived for L1-metrics for stochastic intensities of the Hawkes process. We then deduce rates for the L1-norm of interactions functions of the process. Our results are exemplified by using priors based on piecewise constant functions, with regular or random partitions and priors based on mixtures of Betas distributions. Numerical illustrations are then proposed with in mind applications for inferring functional connec-tivity graphs of neurons.
In this paper, a novel Bayesian nonparametric test for assessing multivariate normal models is presented. While there are extensive frequentist and graphical methods for testing multivariate normality, it is challenging to find Bayesian counterparts. The proposed approach is based on the use of the Dirichlet process and Mahalanobis distance. More precisely, the Mahalanobis distance is employed as a good technique to transform the $m$-variate problem into a univariate problem. Then the Dirichlet process is used as a prior on the distribution of the Mahalanobis distance. The concentration of the distribution of the distance between the posterior process and the chi-square distribution with $m$ degrees of freedom is compared to the concentration of the distribution of the distance between the prior process and the chi-square distribution with $m$ degrees of freedom via a relative belief ratio. The distance between the Dirichlet process and the chi-square distribution is established based on the Anderson-Darling distance. Key theoretical results of the approach are derived. The procedure is illustrated through several examples, in which the proposed approach shows excellent performance.
The problem of reducing the bias of maximum likelihood estimator in a general multivariate elliptical regression model is considered. The model is very flexible and allows the mean vector and the dispersion matrix to have parameters in common. Many frequently used models are special cases of this general formulation, namely: errors-in-variables models, nonlinear mixed-effects models, heteroscedastic nonlinear models, among others. In any of these models, the vector of the errors may have any multivariate elliptical distribution. We obtain the second-order bias of the maximum likelihood estimator, a bias-corrected estimator, and a bias-reduced estimator. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the bias correction and bias reduction schemes.
In the multivariate one-sample location model, we propose a class of flexible robust, affine-equivariant L-estimators of location, for distributions invoking affine-invariance of Mahalanobis distances of individual observations. An involved iteration process for their computation is numerically illustrated.
A Bayesian nonparametric estimator to entropy is proposed. The derivation of the new estimator relies on using the Dirichlet process and adapting the well-known frequentist estimators of Vasicek (1976) and Ebrahimi, Pflughoeft and Soofi (1994). Several theoretical properties, such as consistency, of the proposed estimator are obtained. The quality of the proposed estimator has been investigated through several examples, in which it exhibits excellent performance.