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Empirical Bayes methods can be seen as an approximation to a fully Bayesian treatment of a hierarchical Bayes model.. In, for example, a two-stage hierarchical Bayes model, observed data = {,, …,} are assumed to be generated from an unobserved set of parameters = {,, …,} according to a probability distribution ().
The James–Stein estimator may seem at first sight to be a result of some peculiarity of the problem setting. In fact, the estimator exemplifies a very wide-ranging effect; namely, the fact that the "ordinary" or least squares estimator is often inadmissible for simultaneous estimation of several parameters.
But the adjustment formula yields an artificial shrinkage. A shrinkage estimator is an estimator that, either explicitly or implicitly, incorporates the effects of shrinkage. In loose terms this means that a naive or raw estimate is improved by combining it with other information.
For large samples, the shrinkage intensity will reduce to zero, hence in this case the shrinkage estimator will be identical to the empirical estimator. Apart from increased efficiency the shrinkage estimate has the additional advantage that it is always positive definite and well conditioned. Various shrinkage targets have been proposed:
The sub-models combine to form the hierarchical model, and Bayes' theorem is used to integrate them with the observed data and account for all the uncertainty that is present. The result of this integration is the posterior distribution, also known as the updated probability estimate, as additional evidence on the prior distribution is acquired.
A Bayes estimator derived through the empirical Bayes method is called an empirical Bayes estimator. Empirical Bayes methods enable the use of auxiliary empirical data, from observations of related parameters, in the development of a Bayes estimator. This is done under the assumption that the estimated parameters are obtained from a common prior.
Stein's lemma, named in honor of Charles Stein, is a theorem of probability theory that is of interest primarily because of its applications to statistical inference — in particular, to James–Stein estimation and empirical Bayes methods — and its applications to portfolio choice theory. [1]
Given a vector of parameters to determine, a prior probability () over those parameters and a likelihood (,) for making observation , given parameter values and an experiment design , the posterior probability can be calculated using Bayes' theorem