Bayesian mixture modeling for multivariate conditional distributions

Abstract: We present a Bayesian mixture model for estimating the joint distribution of mixed ordinal, nominal, and continuous data conditional on a set of fixed variables. The model uses multivariate normal and categorical mixture kernels for the random variables. It induces dependence between the random and fixed variables through the means of the multivariate normal mixture kernels and via a truncated local Dirichlet process. The latter encourages observations with similar values of the fixed variables to share mixture components. Using a simulation of data fusion, we illustrate that the model can estimate underlying relationships in the data and the distributions of the missing values more accurately than a mixture model applied to the random and fixed variables jointly. We use the model to analyze consumers' reading behaviors using a quota sample, i.e., a sample where the empirical distribution of some variables is fixed by design and so should not be modeled as random, conducted by the book publisher HarperCollins.