Bayesian nonparametric mixtures of Archimedean copulas

Abstract: Copula-based dependence modeling often relies on parametric formulations. This is mathematically convenient, but can be statistically inefficient when the parametric families are not suitable for the data and model in focus. A Bayesian nonparametric mixture of Archimedean copulas is introduced to increase the flexibility of copula-based dependence modeling. Specifically, the Poisson-Dirichlet process is used as a mixing distribution over the Archimedean copulas' parameter. Properties of the mixture model are studied for the main Archimedean families, and posterior distributions are sampled via their full conditional distributions. The performance of the model is illustrated via numerical experiments involving simulated and real data.