Convergence rates for posterior distributions and adaptive estimation

Bayesian density deconvolution using nonparametric prior distributions is a useful alternative to the frequentist kernel based deconvolution estimators due to its potentially wide range of applicability, straightforward uncertainty quantification and generalizability to more sophisticated models. This article is the first substantive effort to theoretically quantify the behavior of the posterior in this recent line of research. In particular, assuming a known supersmooth erro...

We consider the asymptotic behavior of posterior distributions and Bayes estimators based on observations which are required to be neither independent nor identically distributed. We give general results on the rate of convergence of the posterior measure relative to distances derived from a testing criterion. We then specialize our results to independent, nonidentically distributed observations, Markov processes, stationary Gaussian time series and the white noise model. We ...

We derive rates of contraction of posterior distributions on nonparametric models resulting from sieve priors. The aim of the paper is to provide general conditions to get posterior rates when the parameter space has a general structure, and rate adaptation when the parameter space is, e.g., a Sobolev class. The conditions employed, although standard in the literature, are combined in a different way. The results are applied to density, regression, nonlinear autoregression an...

We consider the problem of estimating the predictive density of future observations from a non-parametric regression model. The density estimators are evaluated under Kullback--Leibler divergence and our focus is on establishing the exact asymptotics of minimax risk in the case of Gaussian errors. We derive the convergence rate and constant for minimax risk among Bayesian predictive densities under Gaussian priors and we show that this minimax risk is asymptotically equivalen...

We study the convergence rates of empirical Bayes posterior distributions for nonparametric and high-dimensional inference. We show that as long as the hyperparameter set is discrete, the empirical Bayes posterior distribution induced by the maximum marginal likelihood estimator can be regarded as a variational approximation to a hierarchical Bayes posterior distribution. This connection between empirical Bayes and variational Bayes allows us to leverage the recent results in...

We consider a prior for nonparametric Bayesian estimation which uses finite random series with a random number of terms. The prior is constructed through distributions on the number of basis functions and the associated coefficients. We derive a general result on adaptive posterior convergence rates for all smoothness levels of the function in the true model by constructing an appropriate "sieve" and applying the general theory of posterior convergence rates. We apply this ge...

In a previous article, a least square regression estimation procedure was proposed: first, we condiser a family of functions and study the properties of an estimator in every unidimensionnal model defined by one of these functions; we then show how to aggregate these estimators. The purpose of this paper is to extend this method to the case of density estimation. We first give a general overview of the method, adapted to the density estimation problem. We then show that this ...

Non-linear latent variable models have become increasingly popular in a variety of applications. However, there has been little study on theoretical properties of these models. In this article, we study rates of posterior contraction in univariate density estimation for a class of non-linear latent variable models where unobserved U(0,1) latent variables are related to the response variables via a random non-linear regression with an additive error. Our approach relies on cha...

This paper introduces a new approach to the study of rates of convergence for posterior distributions. It is a natural extension of a recent approach to the study of Bayesian consistency. In particular, we improve on current rates of convergence for models including the mixture of Dirichlet process model and the random Bernstein polynomial model.

We consider the problem of Bayesian density estimation on the positive semiline for possibly unbounded densities. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian estimator based on the gamma mixture prior which can be viewed as a location mixture. We study convergence rates of Bayesian density estimators based on such mixtures. We construct approximations of the local H\"older densities, and of their extension to unbounded densities, to be continuous mixtures of gamma distributions, leadi...