Empirical Bayes in Bayesian learning: understanding a common practice
贝叶斯学习中的经验贝叶斯:理解一种常见实践
In applications of Bayesian procedures, once a class of priors has been chosen, it may be tempting to fix the prior's hyperparameters from the data, in an empirical Bayes (EB) fashion, usually by their maximum marginal likelihood estimates (MMLE). This is a quite common but questionable practice, lacking a rigorous theoretical basis. We provide a theoretical framework where this form of EB is regarded as a computational strategy for approximating a genuine Bayesian posterior…