Distances between nested densities and a measure of the impact of the prior in Bayesian statistics

Abstract

In this paper we propose tight upper and lower bounds for the Wasserstein distance between any two {univariate continuous distributions} with probability densities $p_1$ and $p_2$ having nested supports. These explicit bounds are expressed in terms of the derivative of the likelihood ratio $p_1/p_2$ as well as the Stein kernel $τ_1$ of $p_1$. The method of proof relies on a new variant of Stein's method which manipulates Stein operators. We give several applications of these bounds. Our main application is in Bayesian statistics : we derive explicit data-driven bounds on the Wasserstein distance between the posterior distribution based on a given prior and the no-prior posterior based uniquely on the sampling distribution. This is the first finite sample result confirming the well-known fact that with well-identified parameters and large sample sizes, reasonable choices of prior distributions will have only minor effects on posterior inferences if the data are benign.