Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics最新文献

Outcomes in the form of rates, fractions, proportions and percentages often appear in various fields. Existing beta and simplex distributions are frequently unable to exhibit satisfactory performances in fitting such continuous data. This paper aims to develop the normalised inverse Gaussian (N-IG) distribution proposed by Lijoi, Mena & Prünster (2005, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 100, 1278–1291) as a new tool for analysing continuous proportional data in (0,1) and renames the N-IG as proportional inverse Gaussian (PIG) distribution. Our main contributions include: (i) To overcome the difficulty of an integral in the PIG density function, we propose a novel minorisation–maximisation (MM) algorithm via the continuous version of Jensen's inequality to calculate the maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in the PIG distribution; (ii) We also develop an MM algorithm aided by the gradient descent algorithm for the PIG regression model, which allows us to explore the relationship between a set of covariates with the mean parameter; (iii) Both the comparative studies and the real data analyses show that the PIG distribution is better when comparing with the beta and simplex distributions in terms of the AIC, the Cramér–von Mises and the Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests. In addition, bootstrap confidence intervals and testing hypothesis on the symmetry of the PIG density are also presented. Simulation studies are conducted and the hospital stay data of Barcelona in 1988 and 1990 are analysed to illustrate the proposed methods.

Robust statistical data modelling under potential model mis-specification often requires leaving the parametric world for the nonparametric. In the latter, parameters are infinite dimensional objects such as functions, probability distributions or infinite vectors. In the Bayesian nonparametric approach, prior distributions are designed for these parameters, which provide a handle to manage the complexity of nonparametric models in practice. However, most modern Bayesian nonparametric models seem often out of reach to practitioners, as inference algorithms need careful design to deal with the infinite number of parameters. The aim of this work is to facilitate the journey by providing computational tools for Bayesian nonparametric inference. The article describes a set of functions available in the R package BNPdensity in order to carry out density estimation with an infinite mixture model, including all types of censored data. The package provides access to a large class of such models based on normalised random measures, which represent a generalisation of the popular Dirichlet process mixture. One striking advantage of this generalisation is that it offers much more robust priors on the number of clusters than the Dirichlet. Another crucial advantage is the complete flexibility in specifying the prior for the scale and location parameters of the clusters, because conjugacy is not required. Inference is performed using a theoretically grounded approximate sampling methodology known as the Ferguson & Klass algorithm. The package also offers several goodness-of-fit diagnostics such as QQ plots, including a cross-validation criterion, the conditional predictive ordinate. The proposed methodology is illustrated on a classical ecological risk assessment method called the species sensitivity distribution problem, showcasing the benefits of the Bayesian nonparametric framework.

Experimental design and analysis has evolved substantially over the last 100 years, driven to a large extent by the power and availability of the computer. To demonstrate this development and encourage the use of experimental design in practice, three experiments from different research areas are presented. In these examples multiple blocking factors have been employed and they show how extraneous variation can be accommodated and interpreted. The examples are used to discuss the importance of blocking and treatment structures in the conduct of designed experiments.

Motivated by the analysis of a comprehensive database of road traffic accidents, we investigate methods of variable selection for spatial point process models on a linear network. The original data may include explanatory spatial covariates, such as road curvature, and ‘mark’ variables attributed to individual accidents, such as accident severity. The treatment of mark variables is new. Variable selection is applied to the canonical covariates, which may include spatial covariate effects, mark effects and mark-covariate interactions. We approximate the likelihood of the point process model by that of a generalised linear model, in such a way that spatial covariates and marks are both associated with canonical covariates. We impose a convex penalty on the log likelihood, principally the elastic-net penalty, and maximise the penalised loglikelihood by cyclic coordinate ascent. A simulation study compares the performances of the lasso, ridge regression and elastic-net methods of variable selection on their ability to select variables correctly, and on their bias and standard error. Standard techniques for selecting the regularisation parameter γ often yielded unsatisfactory results. We propose two new rules for selecting γ which are designed to have better performance. The methods are tested on a small dataset on crimes in a Chicago neighbourhood, and applied to a large dataset of road traffic accidents in Western Australia.

The simultaneous analysis of several financial time series is salient in portfolio setting and risk management. This paper proposes a novel alternating expectation conditional maximisation (AECM) algorithm to estimate the vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) model with variance gamma (VG) error distribution in the multivariate skewed setting. We explain why the VARMA-VG model is suitable for high-frequency returns (HFRs) because VG distribution provides thick tails to capture the high kurtosis in the data and unbounded central density further captures the majority of near-zero HFRs. The distribution can also be expressed in normal-mean-variance mixtures to facilitate model implementation using the Bayesian or expectation maximisation (EM) approach. We adopt the EM approach to avoid the time-consuming Markov chain Monto Carlo sampling and solve the unbounded density problem in the classical maximum likelihood estimation. We conduct extensive simulation studies to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed AECM estimator and apply the models to analyse the dependency between two HFR series from the time zones that only differ by one hour.

Message passing on a factor graph is a powerful paradigm for the coding of approximate inference algorithms for arbitrarily large graphical models. The notion of a factor graph fragment allows for compartmentalisation of algebra and computer code. We show that the Inverse G-Wishart family of distributions enables fundamental variational message passing factor graph fragments to be expressed elegantly and succinctly. Such fragments arise in models for which approximate inference concerning covariance matrix or variance parameters is made, and are ubiquitous in contemporary statistics and machine learning.

Point process models are a natural approach for modelling data that arise as point events. In the case of Poisson counts, these may be fitted easily as a weighted Poisson regression. Point processes lack the notion of sample size. This is problematic for model selection, because various classical criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) are a function of the sample size, n, and are derived in an asymptotic framework where n tends to infinity. In this paper, we develop an asymptotic result for Poisson point process models in which the observed number of point events, m, plays the role that sample size does in the classical regression context. Following from this result, we derive a version of BIC for point process models, and when fitted via penalised likelihood, conditions for the LASSO penalty that ensure consistency in estimation and the oracle property. We discuss challenges extending these results to the wider class of Gibbs models, of which the Poisson point process model is a special case.

The Anna Karenina principle is named after the opening sentence in the eponymous novel: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The two envelopes problem (TEP) is a much-studied paradox in probability theory, mathematical economics, logic and philosophy. Time and again a new analysis is published in which an author claims finally to explain what actually goes wrong in this paradox. Each author (the present author included) emphasises what is new in their approach and concludes that earlier approaches did not get to the root of the matter. We observe that though a logical argument is only correct if every step is correct, an apparently logical argument which goes astray can be thought of as going astray at different places. This leads to a comparison between the literature on TEP and a successful movie franchise: it generates a succession of sequels, and even prequels, each with a different director who approaches the same basic premise in a personal way. We survey resolutions in the literature with a view to synthesis, correct common errors, and give a new theorem on order properties of an exchangeable pair of random variables, at the heart of most TEP variants and interpretations. A theorem on asymptotic independence between the amount in your envelope and the question whether it is smaller or larger shows that the pathological situation of improper priors or infinite expectation values has consequences as we merely approach such a situation.