Bayesian Model Comparison With the g-Prior

Abstract

Model comparison and selection is an important problem in many model-based signal processing applications. Often, very simple information criteria such as the Akaike information criterion or the Bayesian information criterion are used despite their shortcomings. Compared to these methods, Djuric's asymptotic MAP rule was an improvement, and in this paper, we extend the work by Djuric in several ways. Specifically, we consider the elicitation of proper prior distributions, treat the case of real- and complex-valued data simultaneously in a Bayesian framework similar to that considered by Djuric, and develop new model selection rules for a regression model containing both linear and non-linear parameters. Moreover, we use this framework to give a new interpretation of the popular information criteria and relate their performance to the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. By use of simulations, we also demonstrate that our proposed model comparison and selection rules outperform the traditional information criteria both in terms of detecting the true model and in terms of predicting unobserved data. The simulation code is available online.