Bayes factors for nonlinear hypotheses and likelihood distributions

Abstract

SUMMARY New methods are proposed which allow Bayes factors to be computed for hypotheses which impose nonlinear restrictions on the parameters. Projection methods are used to induce the prior distribution over the restricted parameter space which is required for computation of the Bayes factor. Various distance metrics are introduced to define the projection, including a utility-based metric which gives Kullback-Leibler divergence as a special case. Draws from the restricted and unrestricted prior distributions are used to construct marginal distributions of the likelihood which is shown to have additional diagnostic value over and above the Bayes factor. These methods are applied to hypotheses in logistic regression.