Search

In this article we consider Bayesian inference for partially observed Andersson-Madigan-Perlman (AMP) Gaussian chain graph (CG) models. Such models are of particular interest in applications such as biological networks and financial time series. The model itself features a variety of constraints which make both prior modeling and computational inference challenging. We develop a framework for the aforementioned challenges, using a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for statistical inference. Our approach is illustrated on both simulated data as well as real case studies from university graduation rates and a pharmacokinetics study.

Flexible density regression methods, in which the whole distribution of a response vector changes with the covariates, are very useful in some applications. A recently developed technique of this kind uses the matrix-variate Dirichlet process as a prior for a mixing distribution on a coefficient in a multivariate linear regression model. The method is attractive for the convenient way that it allows borrowing strength across different component regressions and for its computational simplicity and tractability. The purpose of the present article is to develop fast online variational Bayes approaches to fitting this model, and to investigate how they perform compared to MCMC and batch variational methods in a number of scenarios.

Multivariate stochastic volatility models are a popular and well-known class of models in the analysis of financial time series because of their abilities to capture the important stylized facts of financial returns data. We consider the problems of filtering distribution estimation and also marginal likelihood calculation for multivariate stochastic volatility models with cross-leverage effects in the high dimensional case, that is when the number of financial time series that we analyze simultaneously (denoted by \begin{document}$ d $\end{document} ) is large. The standard particle filter has been widely used in the literature to solve these intractable inference problems. It has excellent performance in low to moderate dimensions, but collapses in the high dimensional case. In this article, two new and advanced particle filters proposed in [ 4 ], named the space-time particle filter and the marginal space-time particle filter, are explored for these estimation problems. The better performance in both the accuracy and stability for the two advanced particle filters are shown using simulation and empirical studies in comparison with the standard particle filter. In addition, Bayesian static model parameter estimation problem is considered with the advances in particle Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is applied together with the likelihood estimates from the space-time particle filter to infer the static model parameter successfully when that using the likelihood estimates from the standard particle filter fails.