Cutting feedback and modularized analyses in generalized Bayesian inference

Abstract

This work considers Bayesian inference under misspecification for complex statistical models comprised of simpler submodels, referred to as modules, that are coupled together. Such ``multi-modular" models often arise when combining information from different data sources, where there is a module for each data source. When some of the modules are misspecified, the challenges of Bayesian inference under misspecification can sometimes be addressed by using ``cutting feedback" methods, which modify conventional Bayesian inference by limiting the influence of unreliable modules. Here we investigate cutting feedback methods in the context of generalized posterior distributions, which are built from arbitrary loss functions, and present novel findings on their behaviour. We make three main contributions. First, we describe how cutting feedback methods can be defined in the generalized Bayes setting, and discuss the appropriate scaling of the loss functions for different modules to each other and the prior. Second, we derive a novel result about the large sample behaviour of the posterior for a given module's parameters conditional on the parameters of other modules. This formally justifies the use of conditional Laplace approximations, which provide better approximations of conditional posterior distributions compared to conditional distributions from a Laplace approximation of the joint posterior. Our final contribution leverages the large sample approximations of our second contribution to provide convenient diagnostics for understanding the sensitivity of inference to the coupling of the modules, and to implement a new semi-modular posterior approach for conducting robust Bayesian modular inference. The usefulness of the methodology is illustrated in several benchmark examples from the literature on cut model inference.