Max Goplerud presents "Modelling Heterogeneity Using Bayesian Structured Sparsity"

Presentation Date: 

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Location: 

CGIS Knafel Building (K354) - 12-1:30 pm
Abstract: How to estimate heterogeneity, e.g. the effect of some variable differing across observations, is a key question in political science. Methods for doing so make simplifying assumptions about the underlying nature of the heterogeneity to draw reliable inferences. This paper allows a common way of simplifying complex phenomenon (placing observations with similar effects into discrete groups) to be integrated into regression analysis. The framework allows researchers to (i) use their prior knowledge to guide which groups are permissible and (ii) appropriately quantify uncertainty. The paper does this by translating work on "structured sparsity" from a penalized likelihood approach into a Bayesian prior and deriving theoretical results on posterior propriety and inference. It shows that this method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for estimating heterogeneous effects when the underlying heterogeneity is grouped and more effectively identifies groups of observations with different effects in observational data. A link to the paper can be found at j.mp/goplerud_sparsity
See also: 2019