SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Maria Kalli

Publications and source records attributed to Maria Kalli.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Modelling spatial heterogeneity in the effects of area-level covariates on income distributions using Bayesian nonparametric methods

Understanding the how the distribution of an economic outcome, such as income, changes with respect to space and covariates is a key concern for policy makers. To address this, we develop a Bayesian nonparametric model, the Normalised Latent Measure Factor Model with Covariates (NLMFM-C), which expresses a large collection of related densities as mixtures of latent factor densities and allows for spatial and covariate effects. We propose an adaptive Gibbs sampler to automatically infer the number of latent factor distributions, and a rotation method to make posterior inference on different data sets comparable. We apply the NLMFM-C model to Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data, focusing on income distributions for sub-areas of four U.S. states over to different years, 2016 and 2020. We show that the latent factor distributions can be interpreted by income level (e.g., low, medium, and high) and investigate the spatially- and time-changing impact of three covariates: gender, race and educational attainment.

stat.ME

Network Modeling of Asynchronous Change-Points in Multivariate Time Series

This article introduces a novel Bayesian method for asynchronous change-point detection in multivariate time series. This method allows for change-points to occur earlier in some (leading) series followed, after a short delay, by change-points in some other (lagging) series. Such dynamic dependence structure is common in fields such as seismology and neurology where a latent event such as an earthquake or seizure causes certain sensors to register change-points before others. We model these lead-lag dependencies via a latent directed graph and provide a hierarchical prior for learning the graph's structure and parameters. Posterior inference is made tractable by modifying particle MCMC methods designed for univariate change-point problems. We apply our method to both simulated and real datasets from the fields of seismology and neurology. In the simulated data, we find that our method outperforms competing methods in settings where the change-point locations are dependent across series. In the real data applications we show that our model can also uncover interpretable network structure.

stat.ME

Bayesian nonparametric copulas with tail dependence

We introduce a novel bivariate copula model able to capture both the central and tail dependence of the joint probability distribution. Model that can capture the dependence structure within the joint tail have important implications in many application areas where the focus is risk management (e.g. macroeconomics and finance). We use a Bayesian nonparametric approach to introduce a random copula based on infinite partitions of unity. We define a hierarchical prior over an infinite partition of the unit hypercube which has a stick breaking representation leading to an infinite mixture of products of independent beta densities. Capitalising on the stick breaking representation we introduce a Gibbs sample to proceed to inference. For our empirical analysis we consider both simulated and real data (insurance claims and portfolio returns). We compare both our model's ability to capture tail dependence and its out of sample predictive performance to competitive models (e.g. Joe and Clayton copulas) and show that in both simulated and real examples our model outperforms the competitive models.

stat.ME