Publication Type

Working Paper

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

2-2017

Abstract

Deviance information criterion (DIC) has been extensively used for making Bayesian model selection. It is a Bayesian version of AIC and chooses a model that gives the smallest expected Kullback-Leibler divergence between the data generating process (DGP) and a predictive distribution asymptotically. We show that when the plug-in predictive distribution is used, DIC can have a rigorous decision-theoretic justification under regularity conditions. An alternative expression for DIC, based on the Bayesian predictive distribution, is proposed. The new DIC has a smaller penalty term than the original DIC and is very easy to compute from the MCMC output. It is invariant to reparameterization and yields a smaller expected loss than the original DIC asymptotically.

Keywords

AIC, DIC, Bayesian Predictive Distribution, Plug-in Predictive Distribution, Loss Function, Bayesian Model Comparison, Frequentist Risk

Discipline

Econometrics

Research Areas

Econometrics

First Page

1

Last Page

40

Publisher

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper, No. 15-2017

City or Country

Singapore

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Comments

Newer version at http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/yujun/Research/DIC_Theory27.pdf

Included in

Econometrics Commons

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