We introduce a Bayesian approach to predictive density calibration and combination that accounts for parameter uncertainty and model set incompleteness through the use of random calibration functionals and random combination weights. Building on the work of Ranjan and Gneiting, we use infinite beta mixtures for the calibration. The proposed Bayesian nonparametric approach takes advantage of the flexibility of Dirichlet process mixtures to achieve any continuous deformation of linearly combined predictive distributions. The inference procedure is based on combination Gibbs and slice sampling. We provide some conditions under which the proposed probabilistic calibration converges in terms of weak posterior consistency to the true underlying density for both cases of iid and Markovian observations. This calibration property improves upon the earlier calibration approaches. We study the methodology in simulation examples with fat tails and multimodal densities and apply it to density forecasts of daily S&P returns and daily maximum wind speed at the Frankfurt airport. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We introduce and discuss a nonlinear kinetic equation of Boltzmann type which describes the evolution of wealth in a pure gambling process, where the entire sum of wealths of two agents is up for gambling, and randomly shared between the agents. For this equation the analytical form of the steady states is found for various realizations of the random fraction of the sum which is shared to the agents. Among others, the exponential distribution appears as steady state in case of a uniformly distributed random fraction, while Gamma distribution appears for a random fraction which is Beta distributed. The case in which the gambling game is only conservative-in-the-mean is shown to lead to an explicit heavy tailed distribution.

Many popular Bayesian nonparametric priors can be characterized in terms of exchangeable species sampling sequences. However, in some applications, exchangeability may not be appropriate. We introduce a novel and probabilistically coherent family of nonexchangeable species sampling sequences characterized by a tractable predictive probability function with weights driven by a sequence of independent Beta random variables. We compare their theoretical clustering properties with those of the Dirichlet process and the two parameters Poisson–Dirichlet process. The proposed construction provides a complete characterization of the joint process, differently from existing work. We then propose the use of such process as prior distribution in a hierarchical Bayes’ modeling framework, and we describe a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler for posterior inference. We evaluate the performance of the prior and the robustness of the resulting inference in a simulation study, providing a comparison with popular Dirichlet process mixtures and hidden Markov models. Finally, we develop an application to the detection of chromosomal aberrations in breast cancer by leveraging array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

In the Mediterranean fruit fly (medfly), Ceratitis capitata, a highly invasive agricultural pest species, polyandry, associated with sperm precedence, is a recurrent behaviour in the wild. The absence of tools for the unambiguous discrimination between competing sperm from different males in the complex female reproductive tract has strongly limited the understanding of mechanisms controlling sperm dynamics and use.