Abstract
After the observations were observed, the posterior distribution under mild conditions becomes more concentrated in the neighbourhood of the mode of the posterior distribution as sample size n increase. In this paper, the exponential rate of convergence of posterior distribution around the mode is established by using the generalized Laplace method. An example is also given.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Brenner, D., Fraser, D. A. S. and McDunnough, P. (1983). On asymptotic normality of likelihood and conditional analysis,Canad. J. Statist., 10, 163–172.
Chen, C. F. (1983). On asymptotic normality of limiting density functions with Bayesian implications. Technical Report B-83–18, Institute of Statistics, Academia Sinica, China.
Freedman, D. A. (1963). On the asymptotic behaviour of Bayes estimates in discrete case, Ann. Math. Statist., 34, 1386–1403.
Fu, J. C. and Kass, R. E. (1983). The rate at which posterior distributions become concentrated, Technical Report, Dept. of Statist., Univ. of Manitoba, Canada.
Johnson, R. A. (1967). An asymptotic expansion for posterior distributions, Ann. Math. Statist., 38, 1899–1907.
Johnson, R. A. (1970). Asymptotic expansions associated with posterior distributions, Ann. Math. Statist., 41, 851–864.
LeCam, L. (1953). On some asymptotic properties of maximum likelihood estimates and related Bayes' estimates, Univ. California Publ. Statist., 1, 227–330.
Lindley, D. V. (1965). Introduction to Probability and Statistics from a Bayesian Viewpoint, University Press, Cambridge.
Parzen, E. (1953). On uniform convergence of families or sequences of random variables, Univ. California Publ. Statist., 1, 23–53.
Schwartz, L. (1965). On Bayes procedures, Z. Wahrsch. Verw. Gebiete, 4, 10–26.
Walker, A. M. (1969). On the asymptotic behavior of posterior distributions, J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B, 31, 80–88.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This work was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada under Grant NSERC A-9216.
About this article
Cite this article
Fu, J.C., Kass, R.E. The exponential rates of convergence of posterior distributions. Ann Inst Stat Math 40, 683–691 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00049426
Received:
Revised:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00049426