Philippe Gagnon

Philippe Gagnon
Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Doctor of Philosophy

About

21
Publications
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147
Citations
Introduction
I am an assistant professor of actuarial science in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université de Montréal. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Oxford, working with Arnaud Doucet on non-reversible jump algorithms. More broadly, my research interests are Bayesian robustness against conflicting information using heavy-tailed distributions and Markov chain Monte Carlo. See my personal website for more details, https://philippegagnonphd.github.io/website/.

Publications

Publications (21)
Article
Full-text available
Linear regression is ubiquitous in statistical analysis. It is well understood that conflicting sources of information may contaminate the inference when the classical normality of errors is assumed. The contamination caused by the light normal tails follows from an undesirable effect: the posterior concentrates in an area in between the different...
Article
Full-text available
High-dimensional limit theorems have been shown useful to derive tuning rules for finding the optimal scaling in random walk Metropolis algorithms. The assumptions under which weak convergence results are proved are, however, restrictive: the target density is typically assumed to be of a product form. Users may thus doubt the validity of such tuni...
Article
Full-text available
Multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the appealing feature of being amenable to parallel computing. At each iteration, it samples several candidates for the next state of the Markov chain and randomly selects one of them based on a weight function. The canonical weight function is proportional to the targe...
Article
Full-text available
Generalized linear models (GLMs) form one of the most popular classes of models in statistics. The gamma variant is used, for instance, in actuarial science for the modelling of claim amounts in insurance. A flaw of GLMs is that they are not robust against outliers (i.e., against erroneous or extreme data points). A difference in trends in the bulk...
Article
Full-text available
A Peskun ordering between two samplers, implying a dominance of one over the other, is known among the Markov chain Monte Carlo community for being a remarkably strong result. It is however also known for being a result that is notably difficult to establish. Indeed, one has to prove that the probability to reach a state y from a state x, using a s...
Preprint
Full-text available
In the Bayesian literature, a line of research called resolution of conflict is about the characterization of robustness against outliers of statistical models. The robustness characterization of a model is achieved by establishing the limiting behaviour of the posterior distribution under an asymptotic framework in which the outliers move away fro...
Preprint
Full-text available
Heavy-tailed models are often used as a way to gain robustness against outliers in Bayesian analyses. On the other side, in frequentist analyses, M-estimators are often employed. In this paper, the two approaches are reconciled by considering M-estimators as maximum likelihood estimators of heavy-tailed models. We realize that, even from this persp...
Preprint
Full-text available
Lifted samplers form a class of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods which has drawn a lot attention in recent years due to superior performance in challenging Bayesian applications. A canonical example of such sampler is the one that is derived from a random walk Metropolis algorithm for a totally-ordered state space such as the integers or the real n...
Article
Full-text available
Including prior information about model parameters is a fundamental step of any Bayesian statistical analysis. It is viewed positively by some as it allows, among others, to quantitatively incorporate expert opinion about model parameters. It is viewed negatively by others because it sets the stage for subjectivity in statistical analysis. Certainl...
Preprint
Full-text available
Generalized linear models (GLMs) form one of the most popular classes of models in statistics. The gamma variant is used, for instance, in actuarial science for the modelling of claim amount in insurance. A flaw of GLMs is that they are not robust against outliers (i.e., against erroneous or extreme data points). A difference in trends in the bulk...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multiple-try Metropolis (MTM) is a popular Markov chain Monte Carlo method with the appealing feature of being amenable to parallel computing. At each iteration, it samples several candidates for the next state of the Markov chain and randomly selects one of them based on a weight function. The canonical weight function is proportional to the targe...
Article
Full-text available
Bayesian Student-t linear regression is a common robust alternative to the normal model, but its theoretical properties are not well understood. We aim to fill some gaps by providing analyses in two different asymptotic scenarios. The results allow to precisely characterize the trade-off between robustness and efficiency controlled through the degr...
Preprint
Bayesian Student-$t$ linear regression is a common robust alternative to the normal model, but its theoretical properties are not well understood. We aim to fill some gaps by providing analyses in two different asymptotic scenarios. The results allow to precisely characterize the trade-off between robustness and efficiency controlled through the de...
Preprint
Full-text available
Including prior information about model parameters is a fundamental step of any Bayesian statistical analysis. It is viewed positively by some as it allows, among others, to quantitatively incorporate expert opinion about model parameters. It is viewed negatively by others because it sets the stage for subjectivity in statistical analysis. Certainl...
Article
Full-text available
Incorporating information about the target distribution in proposal mechanisms generally produces efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (or at least, algorithms that are more efficient than uninformed counterparts). For instance, it has proved successful to incorporate gradient information in fixed-dimensional algorithms, as seen with algor...
Article
Full-text available
Nonreversible Markov chain Monte Carlo methods often outperform their reversible counterparts in terms of asymptotic variance of ergodic averages and mixing properties. Lifting the state-space is a generic technique for constructing such samplers. The idea is to think of the random variables we want to generate as position variables and to associat...
Preprint
Full-text available
A Peskun ordering between two samplers, implying a dominance of one over the other, is known among the Markov chain Monte Carlo community for being a remarkably strong result, but it is also known for being one that is notably difficult to establish. Indeed, one has to prove that the probability to reach a state, using a sampler, is greater than or...
Article
Full-text available
Principal component regression uses principal components as regressors. It is particularly useful in prediction settings with high-dimensional covariates. The existing literature treating of Bayesian approaches is relatively sparse. We introduce a Bayesian approach that is robust to outliers in both the dependent variable and the covariates. Outlie...
Article
Full-text available
Whole robustness is a nice property to have for statistical models. It implies that the impact of outliers gradually vanishes as they approach plus or minus infinity. So far, the Bayesian literature provides results that ensure whole robustness for the location-scale model. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we generalise the results...
Article
Full-text available
The reversible jump algorithm is a useful Markov chain Monte Carlo method introduced by Green (1995) that allows switches between subspaces of differing dimensionality, and therefore, model selection. Although this method is now increasingly used in key areas (e.g. biology and finance), it remains a challenge to implement it. In this paper, we focu...
Preprint
Principal component regression uses principal components as regressors. It is particularly useful in prediction settings with high-dimensional covariates. The existing literature treating of Bayesian approaches is relatively sparse. We introduce a Bayesian approach that is robust to outliers in both the dependent variable and the covariates. Outlie...

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