Approximate Gibbs Sampler for Efficient Inference of Hierarchical Bayesian Models for Grouped Count DataHierarchical Bayesian Poisson regression models (HBPRMs) provide a flexible
modeling approach of the relationship between predictors and count response
variables. The applications of HBPRMs to large-scale datasets require efficient
inference algorithms due to the high computational cost of inferring many model
parameters based on random sampling. Although Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
algorithms have been widely used for Bayesian inference, sampling using this
class of algorithms is time-consuming for applications with large-scale data
and time-sensitive decision-making, partially due to the non-conjugacy of many
models. To overcome this limitation, this research develops an approximate
Gibbs sampler (AGS) to efficiently learn the HBPRMs while maintaining the
inference accuracy. In the proposed sampler, the data likelihood is
approximated with Gaussian distribution such that the conditional posterior of
the coefficients has a closed-form solution. Numerical experiments using real
and synthetic datasets with small and large counts demonstrate the superior
performance of AGS in comparison to the state-of-the-art sampling algorithm,
especially for large datasets.
arxiv.org