Robust Bayesian Regularized Estimation Based on t Regression Model

The t distribution is a useful extension of the normal distribution, which can be used for statistical modeling of data sets with heavy tails, and provides robust estimation. In this paper, in view of the advantages of Bayesian analysis, we propose a new robust coefficient estimation and variable selection method based on Bayesian adaptive Lasso t regression. A Gibbs sampler is developed based on the Bayesian hierarchical model framework, where we treat the t distribution as a mixture of normal and gamma distributions and put different penalization parameters for different regression coefficients. We also consider the Bayesian t regression with adaptive group Lasso and obtain the Gibbs sampler from the posterior distributions. Both simulation studies and real data example show that our method performs well compared with other existing methods when the error distribution has heavy tails and/or outliers.