Bayesian analysis of multistate event history data: beta-Dirichlet process prior

Abstract

Bayesian analysis of a finite state Markov process, which is popularly used to model multistate event history data, is considered. A new prior process, called a beta-Dirichlet process, is introduced for the cumulative intensity functions and is proved to be conjugate. In addition, the beta-Dirichlet prior is applied to a Bayesian semiparametric regression model. To illustrate the application of the proposed model, we analyse a dataset of credit histories.