In a 1935 paper, and in his book Theory of Probability, Jeffreys developed a methodology for quantifying the evidence in favor of a scientific theory. The centerpiece was a number, now called the Bayes factor, which is the posterior odds of the null hypothesis when the prior probability on the null is one-half. Although there has been much discussion of Bayesian hypothesis testing in the context of criticism of P -values, less attention has been given to the Bayes factor as a practical tool of applied statistics. In this paper we review and discuss the uses of Bayes factors in the context of five scientific applications in genetics, sports, ecology, sociology and psychology.

This article proposes a new framework for the construction of reversible Markov chain samplers that jump between parameter subspaces of differing dimensionality, which is flexible and entirely constructive. It should therefore have wide applicability in model determination problems. The methodology is illustrated with applications to multiple change-point analysis in one and two dimensions, and to a Bayesian comparison of binomial experiments. Some key words: Change-point analysis, Image segmentation, Jump diffusion, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Multiple binomial experiments, Multiple shrinkage, Step function, Voronoi tessellation. 1 Introduction

Abstract: This paper describes and compares various hierarchical mixture prior formulations of variable selection uncertainty in normal linear regression models. These include the nonconjugate SSVS formulation of George and McCulloch (1993), as well as conjugate formulations which allow for analytical simplification. Hyperparameter settings which base selection on practical significance, and the implications of using mixtures with point priors are discussed. Computational methods for posterior evaluation and exploration are considered. Rapid updating methods are seen to provide feasible methods for exhaustive evaluation using Gray Code sequencing in moderately sized problems, and fast Markov Chain Monte Carlo exploration in large problems. Estimation of normalization constants is seen to provide improved posterior estimates of individual model probabilities and the total visited probability. Various procedures are illustrated on simulated sample problems and on a real problem concerning the construction of financial index tracking portfolios.

In a Bayesian analysis of finite mixture models, parameter estimation and clustering are sometimes less straightforward that might be expected. In particular, the common practice of estimating parameters by their posterior mean, and summarising joint posterior distributions by marginal distributions, often leads to nonsensical answers. This is due to the so-called “labelswitching” problem, which is caused by symmetry in the likelihood of the model parameters. A frequent response to this problem is to remove the symmetry using artificial identifiability constraints. We demonstrate that this fails in general to solve the problem, and describe an alternative class of approaches, relabelling algorithms, which arise from attempting to minimise the posterior expected loss under a class of loss functions. We describe in detail one particularly simple and general relabelling algorithm, and illustrate its success in dealing with the labelswitching problem on two examples.

We present several Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods that have been widely used in recent years in econometrics and statistics. Among these is the Gibbs sampler, which has been of particular interest to econometricians. Although the paper summarizes some of the relevant theoretical literature, its emphasis is on the presentation and explanation of applications to important models that are studied in econometrics. We include a discussion of some implementation issues, the use of the methods in connection with the EM algorithm, and how the methods can be helpful in model specification questions. Many of the applications of these methods are of particular interest to Bayesians, but we also point out ways in which frequentist statisticians may find the techniques useful.

In principle, the Bayesian approach to model selection is straightforward. Prior probability distributions are used to describe the uncertainty surrounding all unknowns. After observing the data, the posterior distribution provides a coherent post data summary of the remaining uncertainty which is relevant for model selection. However, the practical implementation of this approach often requires carefully tailored priors and novel posterior calculation methods. In this article, we illustrate some of the fundamental practical issues that arise for two different model selection problems: the variable selection problem for the linear model and the CART model selection problem.

e wrong, which is even worse. Please let us know of any successes or failures. Beware - Gibbs sampling can be dangerous!. BUGS c flcopyright MRC Biostatistics Unit 1995. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) is gratefully acknowledged. The work was funded in part by ESRC (UK) Award Number H519 25 5023. 1 2 Contents 1 Introduction 5 1.1 What is BUGS? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2 For what kind of problems is BUGS best suited? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.4 A simple example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.5 Hardware platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.6 Software . . .

Richardson and Green (1997) present a method of performing a Bayesian analysis of data from a finite mixture distribution with an unknown number of components. Their method is a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, which makes use of the "reversible jump" methodology described by Green (1995). We describe an alternative MCMC method which views the parameters of the model as a (marked) point process, extending methods suggested by Ripley (1977) to create a Markov birth-death process with an appropriate stationary distribution. Our method is easy to implement, even in the case of data in more than one dimension, and we illustrate it on both univariate and bivariate data. Keywords: Bayesian analysis, Birth-death process, Markov process, MCMC, Mixture model, Model Choice, Reversible Jump, Spatial point process 1 Introduction Finite mixture models are typically used to model data where each observation is assumed to have arisen from one of k groups, each group being suitably modelle...

In this paper we introduce an approach and algorithms for model mixing in large prediction problems with correlated predictors. We focus on the choice of predictors in linear models, and mix over possible subsets of candidate predictors. Our approach is based on expressing the space of models in terms of an orthogonalization of the design matrix. Advantages are both statistical and computational. Statistically, orthogonalization often leads to a reduction in the number of competing models by eliminating correlations. Computationally, large model spaces cannot be enumerated; recent approaches are based on sampling models with high posterior probability via Markov chains. Based on orthogonalization of the space of candidate predictors, we can approximate the posterior probabilities of models by products of predictor-specific terms. This leads to an importance sampling function for sampling directly from the joint distribution over the model space, without resorting to Markov chains. Comp...

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