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Theodoros Nicoleris

Publications and source records attributed to Theodoros Nicoleris.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Exact two-stage finite-mixture representations for species sampling processes

Discrete random probability measures are central to Bayesian inference, particularly as priors for mixture modeling and clustering. A broad and unifying class is that of proper species sampling processes (SSPs), encompassing many Bayesian nonparametric priors. We show that any proper SSP admits an exact two-stage finite-mixture representation built from a latent truncation index and a simple reweighting of the atoms. For each realized truncation index, the representation has finitely many atoms, and averaging over the induced law of that index recovers the original SSP setwise. This yields at least two consequences: (i) an exact two-stage finite construction for arbitrary SSPs, without user-chosen truncation levels; and (ii) posterior inference in SSP mixture models via standard finite-mixture machinery, leading to tractable MCMC algorithms without ad hoc truncations. We explore these consequences by deriving explicit total-variation bounds for the approximation error when the truncation level is fixed, and by studying practical performance in mixture modeling, with emphasis on Dirichlet and geometric SSPs.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2020

Beta-Binomial stick-breaking non-parametric prior

A new class of nonparametric prior distributions, termed Beta-Binomial stick-breaking process, is proposed. By allowing the underlying length random variables to be dependent through a Beta marginals Markov chain, an appealing discrete random probability measure arises. The chain's dependence parameter controls the ordering of the stick-breaking weights, and thus tunes the model's label-switching ability. Also, by tuning this parameter, the resulting class contains the Dirichlet process and the Geometric process priors as particular cases, which is of interest for fast convergence of MCMC implementations. Some properties of the model are discussed and a density estimation algorithm is proposed and tested with simulated datasets.

math.ST↗
arXiv2018

Inference for a constrained parameter in presence of an uncertain constraint

We describe a hierarchical Bayesian approach for inference about a parameter $θ$ lower-bounded by $α$ with uncertain $α$, derive some basic identities for posterior analysis about $(θ,α)$, and provide illustrations for normal and Poisson models. For the normal case with unknown mean $θ$ and known variance $σ^2$, we obtain Bayes estimators of $θ$ that take values on $\mathbb{R}$, but that are equally adapted to a lower-bound constraint in being minimax under squared error loss for the constrained problem.

math.ST↗
arXiv2017

Dependent Mixtures of Geometric Weights Priors

A new approach on the joint estimation of partially exchangeable observations is presented by constructing pairwise dependence between $m$ random density functions, each of which is modeled as a mixture of geometric stick breaking processes. This approach is based on a new random central masses version of the Pairwise Dependent Dirichlet Process prior mixture model (PDDP) first introduced in Hatjispyros et al. (2011). The idea is to create pairwise dependence through random measures that are location-preserving-expectations of Dirichlet random measures. Our contention is that mixture modeling with Pairwise Dependent Geometric Stick Breaking Process (PDGSBP) priors is sufficient for prediction and estimation purposes; moreover the associated Gibbs sampler is much faster and easier to implement than its Dirichlet Process based counterpart. To this respect, we provide a-priori-synchronized comparison studies under sparse $m$-scalable synthetic and real data examples.

stat.ME↗
arXiv2015

Dependent Random Density Functions with Common Atoms and Pairwise Dependence

The paper is concerned with constructing pairwise dependence between $m$ random density functions each of which is modeled as a mixture of Dirichlet process model. The key to this is how to create dependencies between random Dirichlet processes. The present paper adopts a plan previously used for creating pairwise dependence, with the simplification that all random Dirichlet processes share the same atoms. Our contention is that for all dependent Dirichlet process models, common atoms are sufficient. We show that by adopting common atoms, it is possible to compute the $L_p$ distances between all pairs of random probability measures.

math.ST↗
arXiv2015

Bayesian Nonparametric Density Estimation under Length Bias

A density estimation method in a Bayesian nonparametric framework is presented when recorded data are not coming directly from the distribution of interest, but from a length biased version. From a Bayesian perspective, efforts to computationally evaluate posterior quantities conditionally on length biased data were hindered by the inability to circumvent the problem of a normalizing constant. In this paper we present a novel Bayesian nonparametric approach to the length bias sampling problem which circumvents the issue of the normalizing constant. Numerical illustrations as well as a real data example are presented and the estimator is compared against its frequentist counterpart, the kernel density estimator for indirect data of Jones (1991).

math.ST↗
arXiv2007

A Fleming--Viot process and Bayesian nonparametrics

This paper provides a construction of a Fleming--Viot measure valued diffusion process, for which the transition function is known, by extending recent ideas of the Gibbs sampler based Markov processes. In particular, we concentrate on the Chapman--Kolmogorov consistency conditions which allows a simple derivation of such a Fleming--Viot process, once a key and apparently new combinatorial result for Pólya-urn sequences has been established.

math.PR↗