Dirichlet process mixtures under affine transformations of the data

Julyan Arbel, Riccardo Corradin and Bernardo Nipoti ()
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Julyan Arbel: Université Grenoble Alpes
Riccardo Corradin: University of Milano Bicocca
Bernardo Nipoti: University of Milano Bicocca

Computational Statistics, 2021, vol. 36, issue 1, No 24, 577-601

Abstract: Abstract Location-scale Dirichlet process mixtures of Gaussians (DPM-G) have proved extremely useful in dealing with density estimation and clustering problems in a wide range of domains. Motivated by an astronomical application, in this work we address the robustness of DPM-G models to affine transformations of the data, a natural requirement for any sensible statistical method for density estimation and clustering. First, we devise a coherent prior specification of the model which makes posterior inference invariant with respect to affine transformations of the data. Second, we formalise the notion of asymptotic robustness under data transformation and show that mild assumptions on the true data generating process are sufficient to ensure that DPM-G models feature such a property. Our investigation is supported by an extensive simulation study and illustrated by the analysis of an astronomical dataset consisting of physical measurements of stars in the field of the globular cluster NGC 2419.

Keywords: Affine data transformations; Asymptotic robustness; Dirichlet process mixture models; Clustering; Multivariate density estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1007/s00180-020-01013-y

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