Adaptive nonparametric Bayesian inference using location-scale mixture priors

Abstract

We study location-scale mixture priors for nonparametric statistical problems, including multivariate regression, density estimation and classification. We show that a rate-adaptive procedure can be obtained if the prior is properly constructed. In particular, we show that adaptation is achieved if a kernel mixture prior on a regression function is constructed using a Gaussian kernel, an inverse gamma bandwidth, and Gaussian mixing weights.

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOS811 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

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