Weighted Particle-Based Optimization for Efficient Generalized Posterior Calibration

In the realm of statistical learning, the increasing volume of accessible data and increasing model complexity ne-cessitate robust methodologies. This paper explores two branches of robust Bayesian methods in response to this trend. The first is generalized Bayesian inference, which introduces a learning rate parameter to enhance robustness against model misspecifications. The second is Gibbs posterior inference, which formulates infer-ential problems using generic loss functions rather than proba-bilistic models. In such approaches, it is necessary to calibrate the spread of the posterior distribution by selecting a learning rate parameter. The study aims to enhance the generalized posterior calibration (GPC) algorithm proposed by [1]. Their algorithm chooses the learning rate to achieve the nominal frequentist coverage probability, but it is computationally intensive because it requires repeated posterior simulations for bootstrap samples. We propose a more efficient version of the GPC inspired by sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers. A target distribution with a different learning rate is evaluated without posterior simulation as in the reweighting step in SMC sampling. Thus, the proposed algorithm can reach the desirable value within a few iterations. This improvement substantially reduces the computational cost of the GPC. Its efficacy is demonstrated through synthetic and real data applications.