Veronika Rockovà: Adaptive Bavesian predictive inference

(23 février 2024/February 23, 2024) Colloque des sciences mathématiques du Québec/CSMQ. www.crmath.ca/en/activities/#...
Abstract: Ayesian predictive inference provides a coherent description of entire predictive uncertainty through predictive distributions. We examine several widely used sparsity priors from the predictive (as opposed to estimation) inference viewpoint. Our context is estimating a predictive distribution of a high-dimensional Gaussian observation with a known variance but an unknown sparse mean under the Kullback-Leibler loss. First, we show that LASSO (Laplace) priors are incapable of achieving rate-optimal performance. This new result contributes to the literature on negative findings about Bayesian LASSO posteriors. However, deploying the Laplace prior inside the Spike-and-Slab framework (for example with the Spike-and-Slab LASSO prior), rate-minimax performance can be attained with properly tuned parameters (depending on the sparsity level sn). We highlight the discrepancy be- tween prior calibration for the purpose of prediction and estimation. Going further, we investigate popular hierarchical priors which are known to attain adaptive rate-minimax performance for estimation. Whether or not they are rate-minimax also for predictive inference has, until now, been unclear. We answer affirmatively by showing that hierarchical Spike-and-Slab priors are adaptive and attain the minimax rate without the knowledge of sn. This is the first rate-adaptive result in the literature on predictive density estimation in sparse setups. This finding celebrates benefits of a fully Bayesian inference.