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In recent years, there has been a considerable interest to study count time series with a dependence structure and appearance of excess of zeros values. Such series are commonly encountered in diverse disciplines, such as economics, financial research, environmental science, public health, among others. In this paper, we propose a stationary p-order integer-valued autoregressive process with zero-inflated Poisson innovations, called the ZINAR(p) times series model. We study some of its theoretical properties and develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for inferring parameters from Bayesian perspectives. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of proposed ZINAR(p) model through simulated and real data examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection arises in many areas of modern science. For example, in genomic research, we want to find the genes that can be used to separate tissues of different classes (e.g. cancer and normal). One approach is to fit regression/classification models with certain penalization. In the past decade, hyper-LASSO penalization (priors) have received increasing attention in the literature. However, fully Bayesian methods that use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for regression/classification with hyper-LASSO priors are still in lack of development. In this paper, we introduce an MCMC method for learning multinomial logistic regression with hyper-LASSO priors. Our MCMC algorithm uses Hamiltonian Monte Carlo in a restricted Gibbs sampling framework. We have used simulation studies and real data to demonstrate the superior performance of hyper-LASSO priors compared to LASSO, and to investigate the issues of choosing heaviness and scale of hyper-LASSO priors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The full Bayesian significance test (FBST) was introduced by Pereira and Stern for measuring the evidence of a precise null hypothesis. The FBST requires both numerical optimization and multidimensional integration, whose computational cost may be heavy when testing a precise null hypothesis on a scalar parameter of interest in the presence of a large number of nuisance parameters. In this paper we propose a higher order approximation of the measure of evidence for the FBST, based on tail area expansions of the marginal posterior of the parameter of interest. When in particular focus is on matching priors, further results are highlighted. Numerical illustrations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Joint models are statistical tools for estimating the association between time-to-event and longitudinal outcomes. One challenge to the application of joint models is its computational complexity. Common estimation methods for joint models include a two-stage method, Bayesian and maximum-likelihood methods. In this work, we consider joint models of a time-to-event outcome and multiple longitudinal processes and develop a maximum-likelihood estimation method using the expectation–maximization algorithm. We assess the performance of the proposed method via simulations and apply the methodology to a data set to determine the association between longitudinal systolic and diastolic blood pressure measures and time to coronary artery disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by molecular biology, there has been an upsurge of research activities in directional statistics in general and its Bayesian aspect in particular. The central distribution for the circular case is von Mises distribution which has two parameters (mean and concentration) akin to the univariate normal distribution. However, there has been a challenge to sample efficiently from the posterior distribution of the concentration parameter. We describe a novel, highly efficient algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution and fill this long-standing gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new iterative algorithm, called model walking algorithm, to the Bayesian model averaging method on the longitudinal regression models with AR(1) random errors within subjects. The Markov chain Monte Carlo method together with the model walking algorithm are employed. The proposed method is successfully applied to predict the progression rates on a myopia intervention trial in children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well known that the approximate Bayesian computation algorithm based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods suffers from the sensitivity to the choice of starting values, inefficiency and a low acceptance rate. To overcome these problems, this study proposes a generalization of the multiple-point Metropolis algorithm, which proceeds by generating multiple-dependent proposals and then by selecting a candidate among the set of proposals on the basis of weights that can be chosen arbitrarily. The performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by using both simulated and real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]