We present a computational approach for generating Markov bases for multi-way
contin- gency tables whose cells counts might be constrained by fixed marginals
and by lower and upper bounds. Our framework includes tables with structural
zeros as a particular case. In- stead of computing the entire Markov basis in
an initial step, our framework finds sets of local moves that connect each
table in the reference set with a set of neighbor tables. We construct a Markov
chain on the reference set of tables that requires only a set of local moves at
each iteration.
The paper considers general multiplicative models for complete and incomplete
contingency tables that generalize log-linear and several other models and are
entirely coordinate free. Sufficient conditions of the existence of maximum
likelihood estimates under these models are given, and it is shown that the
usual equivalence between multinomial and Poisson likelihoods holds if and only
if an overall effect is present in the model.
We introduce efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for inference and
model determination in multivariate and matrix-variate Gaussian graphical
models. Our framework is based on the G-Wishart prior for the precision matrix
associated with graphs that can be decomposable or non-decomposable. We extend
our sampling algorithms to a novel class of conditionally autoregressive models
for sparse estimation in multivariate lattice data, with a special emphasis on
the analysis of spatial data.
In Bayesian analysis of multi-way contingency tables, the selection of a
prior distribution for either the log-linear parameters or the cell
probabilities parameters is a major challenge. In this paper, we define a
flexible family of conjugate priors for the wide class of discrete hierarchical
log-linear models, which includes the class of graphical models. These priors
are defined as the Diaconis--Ylvisaker conjugate priors on the log-linear
parameters subject to "baseline constraints" under multinomial sampling.