Abstract

A general methodology is presented for finding suitable Poisson log-linear models with applications to multiway contingency tables. Mixtures of multivariate normal distributions are used to model prior opinion when a subset of the regression vector is believed to be nonzero. This prior distribution is studied for two and three-way contingency tables, in which the regression coefficients are interpretable in terms of odds-ratios in the table. Efficient and accurate schemes are proposed for calculating the posterior model probabilities. The methods are illustrated for a large number of two-way simulated tables and for two three-way tables. These methods appear to be useful in selecting the best log-linear model and in estimating parameters of interest that reflect uncertainty in the true model. Key words and phrases: Bayes factors, Laplace method, Gibbs sampling, Model selection, Odds ratios. AMS subject classifications: Primary 62H17, 62F15, 62J12. 1 Introduction 1.1 Bayesian testing...

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