Bayesian Posterior Comprehension via Message from Monte Carlo

L. J. Fitzgibbon, D. L. Dowe and L. Allison, Second Hawaii International Conference on Statistics and Related Fields, Hawaii, 5-8 June 2003

home1 home2
 Bib
 Algorithms
 Bioinfo
 FP
 Logic
 MML
 Prog.Lang
and the
 Book

MML
 Glossary
 Discrete
 Continuous
 Structured
 SMML
 KL-dist
 "Art"
 Ind. Inf.

Abstract. We discuss the problem of producing an epitome, or brief summary, of a Bayesian posterior distribution - and then investigate a general solution based on the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle. Clearly, the optimal criterion for choosing such an epitome is determined by the epitome's intended use. The interesting general case is where this use is unknown since, in order to be practical, the choice of epitome criterion becomes subjective. We identify a number of desirable properties that an epitome could have - facilitation of point estimation, human comprehension, and fast approximation of posterior expectations. We call these the properties of Bayesian Posterior Comprehension and show that the Minimum Message Length principle can be viewed as an epitome criterion that produces epitomes having these properties. We then present and extend Message from Monte Carlo as a means for constructing instantaneous Minimum Message Length codebooks (and epitomes) using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The Message from Monte Carlo methodology is illustrated for binary regression, generalised linear model, and multiple change-point problems.

Keywords: Bayesian, Minimum Message Length, MML, MCMC, RJMCMC, Message from Monte Carlo, MMC, posterior summary, epitome, Bayesian Posterior Comprehension.

[preprint.pdf][5/'03], [preprint.pdf][5/'03]

1 Introduction
2 Bayesian Posterior Comprehension
3 Message ffrom Monte Carlo
3.1 The Point Estimate
4 Unimodal Likelihood Function
4.1 Example: Dog Shock Experiment
4.2 Example: Beetle Mortality Data
5 Multimodal Likelihood Function
6 Variable Dimension Posterior
6.1 Example: Multiple Change-Point Model
(segmentation)
. . .
Coding Ockham's Razor, L. Allison, Springer

A Practical Introduction to Denotational Semantics, L. Allison, CUP

Linux
 Ubuntu
free op. sys.
OpenOffice
free office suite
The GIMP
~ free photoshop
Firefox
web browser

Also see:
 II
  ACSC06
  JFP05
  ACSC03

© L. Allison   http://www.allisons.org/ll/   (or as otherwise indicated),
Faculty of Information Technology (Clayton), Monash University, Australia 3800 (6/'05 was School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Fac. Info. Tech., Monash University,
was Department of Computer Science, Fac. Comp. & Info. Tech., '89 was Department of Computer Science, Fac. Sci., '68-'71 was Department of Information Science, Fac. Sci.)
Created with "vi (Linux + Solaris)",  charset=iso-8859-1,  fetched Friday, 29-Mar-2024 09:34:51 AEDT.