IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/csdana/v168y2022ics0167947321002383.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An objective Bayes factor with improper priors

Author

Listed:
  • Villa, Cristiano
  • Walker, Stephen G.

Abstract

A new look at the use of improper priors in Bayes factors for model comparison is presented. As is well known, in such a case, the Bayes factor is only defined up to an arbitrary constant. Most current methods overcome the problem by using part of the sample to train the Bayes factor (Fractional Bayes Factor) or to transform the improper prior in to a proper distribution (Intrinsic Bayes Factors) and use the remainder of the sample for the model comparison. It is provided an alternative approach which relies on matching divergences between density functions so as to establish a value for the constant appearing in the Bayes factor. These are the Kullback–Leibler divergence and the Fisher information divergence; the latter being crucial as it does not depend on an unknown normalizing constant. Demonstrations of the performance of the proposed method are provided through numerous illustrations and comparisons, showing that the main advantage over existing ones is that it does not require any input from the experimenter; it is fully automated.

Suggested Citation

  • Villa, Cristiano & Walker, Stephen G., 2022. "An objective Bayes factor with improper priors," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:csdana:v:168:y:2022:i:c:s0167947321002383
    DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2021.107404
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167947321002383
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.csda.2021.107404?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Walker, Stephen G., 2016. "Bayesian information in an experiment and the Fisher information distance," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 5-9.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. F. Giummolè & V. Mameli & E. Ruli & L. Ventura, 2019. "Objective Bayesian inference with proper scoring rules," TEST: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 28(3), pages 728-755, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:csdana:v:168:y:2022:i:c:s0167947321002383. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/csda .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.