Abstract
The local sensitivity of a posterior quantity ρ(P) to the choice of the prior P is considered. When the prior Pλ is indexed by parameter λ, a natural measure is the total derivative of ρ(P λ) w.r.t. λ. Total derivative, however, is direction specific. To measure the local sensitivity of ρ(P λ) to specification of λ, one may either use the norm (maximum over all directions) of the total derivative or alternatively, the average sensitivity which evaluates the average of this total derivative over all directions. Simple expressions are given for the maximum and average sensitivity which make their evaluations very easy. Discussion and several examples illustrate implications of these ideas.
Research supported in part by ONR Grant number N00014-93-1-0174.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Basu, S., Jammalamadaka, S.R., and Liu, W. (1993), “Qualitative robustness and stability of posterior distributions and posterior quantities”, Technical Report, 238, Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Basu, S. and DasGupta, A. (1992), “Bayesian analysis with distribution bands: the role of the loss function”, verbally accepted in Statist. and Decisions
Berger, J. (1993), “An overview of robust Bayesian analysis”, Technical Report, 93–53, Department of Statistics, Purdue University.
Diaconis, P. and Freedman, D. (1986), “On the consistency of Bayes estimates”, Ann. Statist., 14, 1–67.
Hampel, F.R. (1971), “A general qualitative definition of r•bustness”, Ann. Math. Statist., 42, 1887–1896.
Huber, P.J. (1981), Robust Statistics, John Wiley: New York.
MacRae, E.0 (1974), “Matrix derivatives with an application to an adaptive linear decision problem”, Ann. Statist., 2, 337–346.
Polasek, W. (1985), “A dual approach for matrix-derivatives”, Metrika, 32, 275292.
Rao, C.R. (1973), Linear statistical inference and its applications,Wiley.
Rivier, N., Englman, R., and Levine, R. D. (1990), “Constructing priors in maximum entropy methods”, In Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, Rivier, N., Englman, R., and Levine, R. D (Ed.), 233–242, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rodriguez, C.C. (1994), “Bayesian robustness: a new look from geometry”, to appear in Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Statistics, G. Heidbreder ( Ed. ), Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rudin, W. (1976), Principles of mathematical analysis,McGraw-Hill.
Ruggeri, F. and Wasserman, L. (1993), “Infinitesimal sensitivity of posterior distributions”, Canad. J. Statist., 21, 195–203.
Skilling, J. (1990), “Quantified maximum entropy”, In Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, Skilling, J (Ed.), 341–350, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Srinivasan, C. and Truszczynska, H. (1990), “Approximation to the range of a ratio-linear posterior quantity based on Fréchet derivative”, Technical Report, 289, Department of Statistics, University of Kentucky.
Tukey, J.W. (1960), “A survey of sampling from contaminated distributions”, In Contributions to Statistics and Probability, I. Olkin et al (Ed.), 448–485, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Wasserman, L. (1992), “Recent Methodological advances in robust Bayesian inference”, In Bayesian Statistics.4, J.M. Bernardo, et. al. (Eds.), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Basu, S., Jammalamadaka, S.R., Liu, W. (1996). Local Posterior Robustness with Parametric Priors: Maximum and Average Sensitivity. In: Heidbreder, G.R. (eds) Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8729-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8729-7_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4407-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8729-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive