A0424
Title: Using history matching for prior choice
Authors: Xueou Wang - Singapore University of Technology and Design (Singapore) [presenting]
David Nott - National University of Singapore (Singapore)
Christopher Drovandi - Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
Kerrie Mengersen - Queensland University of Technology (Australia)
Michael Evans - University of Toronto (Canada)
Abstract: It can be important in Bayesian analyses of complex models to construct informative prior distributions which reflect knowledge external to the data at hand. Nevertheless, how much prior information an analyst can elicit from an expert will be limited due to constraints of time, cost and other factors. Effective numerical methods are developed for exploring reasonable choices of a prior distribution from a parametric class, when prior information is specified in the form of some limited constraints on prior predictive distributions, and where these prior predictive distributions are analytically intractable. The methods developed may be thought of as a novel application of the ideas of history matching, a technique developed in the literature on assessment of computer models. We illustrate the approach in the context of logistic regression and sparse signal shrinkage prior distributions for high-dimensional linear models.
