Asymptotics for posterior hazards

Citation
De Blasi, Pierpaolo et al., Asymptotics for posterior hazards, Annals of statistics , 37(4), 2009, pp. 1906-1945
Journal title
ISSN journal
00905364
Volume
37
Issue
4
Year of publication
2009
Pages
1906 - 1945
Database
ACNP
SICI code
Abstract
An important issue in survival analysis is the investigation and the modeling of hazard rates. Within a Bayesian nonparametric framework, a natural and popular approach is to model hazard rates as kernel mixtures with respect to a completely random measure. In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the asymptotic behavior of such models. We investigate consistency of the posterior distribution and derive fixed sample size central limit theorems for both linear and quadratic functionals of the posterior hazard rate. The general results are then specialized to various specific kernels and mixing measures yielding consistency under minimal conditions and neat central limit theorems for the distribution of functionals.