Non-Homogeneous Poisson Processes Applied to Count Data:A Bayesian Approach Considering Different Prior Distributions

This article discusses the Bayesian approach for count data using non-homogeneous Poisson processes, considering different prior distributions for the model parameters. A Bayesian approach using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation methods for this model was first introduced by [1], taking into account software reliability data and considering non-informative prior distributions for the parameters of the model. With the non-informative prior distributions presented by these authors, computational difficulties may occur when using MCMC methods. This article considers different prior distributions for the parameters of the proposed model, and studies the effect of such prior distributions on the convergence and accuracy of the results. In order to illustrate the proposed methodology, two examples are considered: the first one has simulated data, and the second has a set of data for pollution issues at a region in Mexico City.

A distribution prior model for airplane segmentation without exact template

In many practical applications of image segmentation problems,employing prior information can greatly improve segmentation results.This paper continues to study one kind of prior information,called prior distribution.Within this research,there is no exact template of the object;instead only several samples are given.The proposed method,called the parametric distribution prior model,extends our previous model by adding the training procedure to learn the prior distribution of the objects.Then this paper establishes the energy function of the active contour model(ACM)with consideration of this parametric form of prior distribution.Therefore,during the process of segmenting,the template can update itself while the contour evolves.Experiments are performed on the airplane data set.Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed method that with the information of prior distribution,the segmentation effect and speed can be both improved efficaciously.

A new method for evaluating the firing precision of multiple launch rocket system based on Bayesian theory

How to effectively evaluate the firing precision of weapon equipment at low cost is one of the core contents of improving the test level of weapon system.A new method to evaluate the firing precision of the MLRS considering the credibility of simulation system based on Bayesian theory is proposed in this paper.First of all,a comprehensive index system for the credibility of the simulation system of the firing precision of the MLRS is constructed combined with the group analytic hierarchy process.A modified method for determining the comprehensive weight of the index is established to improve the rationality of the index weight coefficients.The Bayesian posterior estimation formula of firing precision considering prior information is derived in the form of mixed prior distribution,and the rationality of prior information used in estimation model is discussed quantitatively.With the simulation tests,the different evaluation methods are compared to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Finally,the experimental results show that the effectiveness of estimation method for firing precision is improved by more than 25%.

Minimax Estimation of the Function of Parameters in Normal Distribution

The estimation of the functionθ=exp{αμ+bσ2} of parameters (μ,σ2) in normal distribution N(μ,σ2) is discussed. And when the prior distributions ofμandσ2 are independent, under the loss function L(θ,δ)=(θ-1×δ-1)2, the Bayesian estimation and the existence and computing method on minimax estimation are deeply discussed.

Performance of Bayesian Propensity Score Adjustment for Estimating Causal Effects in Small Clinical Trials

Propensity score (PS) adjustment can control confounding effects and reduce bias when estimating treatment effects in non-randomized trials or observational studies. PS methods are becoming increasingly used to estimate causal effects, including when the sample size is small compared to the number of confounders. With numerous confounders, quasi-complete separation can easily occur in logistic regression used for estimating the PS, but this has not been addressed. We focused on a Bayesian PS method to address the limitations of quasi-complete separation faced by small trials. Bayesian methods are useful because they estimate the PS and causal effects simultaneously while considering the uncertainty of the PS by modelling it as a latent variable. In this study, we conducted simulations to evaluate the performance of Bayesian simultaneous PS estimation by considering the specification of prior distributions for model comparison. We propose a method to improve predictive performance with discrete outcomes in small trials. We found that the specification of prior distributions assigned to logistic regression coefficients was more important in the second step than in the first step, even when there was a quasi-complete separation in the first step. Assigning Cauchy (0, 2.5) to coefficients improved the predictive performance for estimating causal effects and improving the balancing properties of the confounder.

Bayesian sequential testing for exponential life system with reliability growth

A Bayesian sequential testing method is proposed to evaluate system reliability index with reliability growth during development.The method develops a reliability growth model of repairable systems for failure censored test,and figures out the approach to determine the prior distribution of the system failure rate by applying the reliability growth model to incorporate the multistage test data collected from system development.Furthermore,the procedure for the Bayesian sequential testing is derived for the failure rate of the exponential life system,which enables the decision to terminate or continue development test.Finally,a numerical example is given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model and procedure.

PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION OF DYNAMIC MODELS USING A BAYES APPROACH

The Bayesian method of statistical analysis has been applied to the parameter identification problem. A method is presented to identify parameters of dynamic models with the Bayes estimators of measurement frequencies. This is based on the solution of an inverse generalized evaluate problem. The stochastic nature of test data is considered and a normal distribution is used for the measurement frequencies. An additional feature is that the engineer's confidence in the measurement frequencies is quantified and incorporated into the identification procedure. A numerical example demonstrates the efficiency of the method.

Graph Laplacian Matrix Learning from Smooth Time-Vertex Signal

In this paper,we focus on inferring graph Laplacian matrix from the spatiotemporal signal which is defined as“time-vertex signal”.To realize this,we first represent the signals on a joint graph which is the Cartesian product graph of the time-and vertex-graphs.By assuming the signals follow a Gaussian prior distribution on the joint graph,a meaningful representation that promotes the smoothness property of the joint graph signal is derived.Furthermore,by decoupling the joint graph,the graph learning framework is formulated as a joint optimization problem which includes signal denoising,timeand vertex-graphs learning together.Specifically,two algorithms are proposed to solve the optimization problem,where the discrete second-order difference operator with reversed sign(DSODO)in the time domain is used as the time-graph Laplacian operator to recover the signal and infer a vertex-graph in the first algorithm,and the time-graph,as well as the vertex-graph,is estimated by the other algorithm.Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can effectively infer meaningful time-and vertex-graphs from noisy and incomplete data.

Bayesian Estimation in Dam Monitoring Networks

A Bayesian estimator with informative prior distributions （a multi-normal and an inverted gamma distribution）, adequate to displacement estimation at dam displacement monitoring networks, is presented. The hyper-parameters of the prior distributions are obtained by Bayesian empirical methods with non-informative meta-priors. The performances of the Bayes estimator and the classical generalized lest squares estimator are compared using two measurements of the horizontal monitoring network of a concrete gravity dam： the Penha Garcia dam （Portugal）. In order to test the robustness of the two estimators, a gross error is added to one of the measured horizontal directions： the Bayes estimator proves to be significantly more robust than the classic maximum likelihood estimator.

Application of Bayesian approach to hydrological frequency analysis

An existing Bayesian flood frequency analysis method is applied to quantile estimation for Pearson type three (P-III) probability distribution. The method couples prior and sample information under the framework of Bayesian formula, and the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling approach is used to estimate posterior distributions of parameters. Different from the original sampling algorithm (i.e. the important sampling) used in the existing approach, we use the adaptive metropolis (AM) sampling technique to generate a large number of parameter sets from Bayesian parameter posterior distributions in this paper. Consequently, the sampling distributions for quantiles or the hydrological design values are constructed. The sampling distributions of quantiles are estimated as the Bayesian method can provide not only various kinds of point estimators for quantiles, e.g. the expectation estimator, but also quantitative evaluation on uncertainties of these point estimators. Therefore, the Bayesian method brings more useful information to hydrological frequency analysis. As an example, the flood extreme sample series at a gauge are used to demonstrate the procedure of application.