Bayesian Nonparametrics for Directional Statistics

Abstract: We introduce a density basis of the trigonometric polynomials that is suitable to mixture modelling. Statistical and geometric properties are derived, suggesting it as a circular analogue to the Bernstein polynomial densities. Nonparametric priors are constructed using this basis and a simulation study shows that the use of the resulting Bayes estimator may provide gains over comparable circular density estimators previously suggested in the literature. From a theoretical point of view, we propose a general prior specification framework for density estimation on compact metric space using sieve priors. This is tailored to density bases such as the one considered herein and may also be used to exploit their particular shape-preserving properties. Furthermore, strong posterior consistency is shown to hold under notably weak regularity assumptions and adaptative convergence rates are obtained in terms of the approximation properties of positive linear operators generating our models.