Clustering with proportional scaling
James Q. Smith, Paul E. Anderson, Silvia Liverani · Warwick Research Archive Portal (University of Warwick) · 2008
Conjugacy assumptions are often used in Bayesian selection over a partition because they allow the otherwise unfeasibly large model space to be searched very quickly. The implications of such models can be analysed algebraically. In this paper we use the explicit forms of the associated Bayes factors to demonstrate that such methods can be unstable under common settings of the associated hyperparameters. We then prove that the regions of instability can be removed by setting the hyperparameters in an unconventional way. Under this family of assignments we prove that model selection is determined by an implicit separation measure: a function of the hyperparameters and the sufficient statistics of clusters in a given partition. We show that this family of separation measures has desirable properties. The proposed methodology is illustrated through the selection of clusters of longitudinal gene expression profiles.