Efficient Bayesian Regularization for Graphical Model Selection

Abstract

There has been an intense development in the Bayesian graphical model literature over the past decade; however, most of the existing methods are restricted to moderate dimensions. We propose a novel graphical model selection approach for large dimensional settings where the dimension increases with the sample size, by decoupling model fitting and covariance selection. First, a full model based on a complete graph is fit under a novel class of mixtures of inverse–Wishart priors, which induce shrinkage on the precision matrix under an equivalence with Cholesky-based regularization, while enabling conjugate updates. Subsequently, a post-fitting model selection step uses penalized joint credible regions to perform model selection. This allows our methods to be computationally feasible for large dimensional settings using a combination of straightforward Gibbs samplers and efficient post-fitting inferences. Theoretical guarantees in terms of selection consistency are also established. Simulations show that the proposed approach compares favorably with competing methods, both in terms of accuracy metrics and computation times. We apply this approach to a cancer genomics data example.