Confidence sequences with informative, bounded-influence priors

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cortinovis, Stefano, Kilian, Valentin, Caron, François
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Cortinovis, Stefano
Kilian, Valentin
Caron, François
author_facet Cortinovis, Stefano
Kilian, Valentin
Caron, François
contents Confidence sequences are collections of confidence regions that simultaneously cover the true parameter for every sample size at a prescribed confidence level. Tightening these sequences is of practical interest and can be achieved by incorporating prior information through the method of mixture martingales. However, confidence sequences built from informative priors are vulnerable to misspecification and may become vacuous when the prior is poorly chosen. We study this trade-off for Gaussian observations with known variance. By combining the method of mixtures with a global informative prior whose tails are polynomial or exponential and the extended Ville's inequality, we construct confidence sequences that are sharper than their non-informative counterparts whenever the prior is well specified, yet remain bounded under arbitrary misspecification. The theory is illustrated with several classical priors.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Confidence sequences with informative, bounded-influence priors
Cortinovis, Stefano
Kilian, Valentin
Caron, François
Methodology
Statistics Theory
Confidence sequences are collections of confidence regions that simultaneously cover the true parameter for every sample size at a prescribed confidence level. Tightening these sequences is of practical interest and can be achieved by incorporating prior information through the method of mixture martingales. However, confidence sequences built from informative priors are vulnerable to misspecification and may become vacuous when the prior is poorly chosen. We study this trade-off for Gaussian observations with known variance. By combining the method of mixtures with a global informative prior whose tails are polynomial or exponential and the extended Ville's inequality, we construct confidence sequences that are sharper than their non-informative counterparts whenever the prior is well specified, yet remain bounded under arbitrary misspecification. The theory is illustrated with several classical priors.
title Confidence sequences with informative, bounded-influence priors
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22925