On a divergence-based prior analysis of stick-breaking processes

Abstract: The nonparametric view of Bayesian inference has transformed statistics and many of its applications. The canonical Dirichlet process and other more general families of nonparametric priors have served as a gateway to solve frontier uncertainty quantification problems of large, or infinite, nature. This success has been greatly due to available constructions and representations of such distributions, the two most useful constructions are the one based on normalization of homogeneous completely random measures and that based on stick-breaking processes. Hence, understanding their distributional features and how different random probability measures compare among themselves is a key ingredient for their proper application. In this paper, we analyse the discrepancy among some nonparametric priors employed in the literature. Initially, we compute the mean and variance of the random Kullback-Leibler divergence between the Dirichlet process and the geometric process. Subsequently, we extend our analysis to encompass a broader class of exchangeable stick-breaking processes, which includes the Dirichlet and geometric processes as extreme cases. Our results establish quantitative conditions where all the aforementioned priors are close in total variation distance. In such instances, adhering to Occam's razor principle advocates for the preference of the simpler process.