Hedibert F. Lopes

Bruno Fava, Hedibert F. Lopes

The emergence of Big Data raises the question of how to model economic relations when there is a large number of possible explanatory variables. We revisit the issue by comparing the possibility of using dense or sparse models in a Bayesian approach, allowing for variable selection and shrinkage. More specifically, we discuss the results reached by Giannone, Lenza, and Primiceri (2020) through a "Spike-and-Slab" prior, which suggest an "illusion of sparsity" in economic data, as no clear patterns of sparsity could be detected. We make a further revision of the posterior distributions of the model, and propose three experiments to evaluate the robustness of the adopted prior distribution. We find that the pattern of sparsity is sensitive to the prior distribution of the regression coefficients, and present evidence that the model indirectly induces variable selection and shrinkage, which suggests that the "illusion of sparsity" could be, itself, an illusion. Code is available on github.com/bfava/IllusionOfIllusion.

Paloma W. Uribe, Hedibert F. Lopes

In the present work, we consider variable selection and shrinkage for the Gaussian dynamic linear regression within a Bayesian framework. In particular, we propose a novel method that allows for time-varying sparsity, based on an extension of spike-and-slab priors for dynamic models. This is done by assigning appropriate Markov switching priors for the time-varying coefficients' variances, extending the previous work of Ishwaran and Rao (2005). Furthermore, we investigate different priors, including the common Inverted gamma prior for the process variances, and other mixture prior distributions such as Gamma priors for both the spike and the slab, which leads to a mixture of Normal-Gammas priors (Griffin ad Brown, 2010) for the coefficients. In this sense, our prior can be view as a dynamic variable selection prior which induces either smoothness (through the slab) or shrinkage towards zero (through the spike) at each time point. The MCMC method used for posterior computation uses Markov latent variables that can assume binary regimes at each time point to generate the coefficients' variances. In that way, our model is a dynamic mixture model, thus, we could use the algorithm of Gerlach et al (2000) to generate the latent processes without conditioning on the states. Finally, our approach is exemplified through simulated examples and a real data application.