Bayesian High-dimensional Linear Regression with Sparse Projection-posterior

Abstract

We consider a novel Bayesian approach to estimation, uncertainty quantification, and variable selection for a high-dimensional linear regression model under sparsity. The number of predictors can be nearly exponentially large relative to the sample size. We put a conjugate normal prior initially disregarding sparsity, but for making an inference, instead of the original multivariate normal posterior, we use the posterior distribution induced by a map transforming the vector of regression coefficients to a sparse vector obtained by minimizing the sum of squares of deviations plus a suitably scaled $\ell_1$-penalty on the vector. We show that the resulting sparse projection-posterior distribution contracts around the true value of the parameter at the optimal rate adapted to the sparsity of the vector. We show that the true sparsity structure gets a large sparse projection-posterior probability. We further show that an appropriately recentred credible ball has the correct asymptotic frequentist coverage. Finally, we describe how the computational burden can be distributed to many machines, each dealing with only a small fraction of the whole dataset. We conduct a comprehensive simulation study under a variety of settings and found that the proposed method performs well for finite sample sizes. We also apply the method to several real datasets, including the ADNI data, and compare its performance with the state-of-the-art methods. We implemented the method in the \texttt{R} package called \texttt{sparseProj}, and all computations have been carried out using this package.