Leonhard Held: Adaptive prior weighting in generalized linear models

The prior distribution is a key ingredient in Bayesian inference. Prior information in generalized linear models may come from different sources and may or may not be in conflict with the observed data. Various methods have been proposed to quantify a potential prior-data conflict, such as Box's p-value. However, the literature is sparse on methodology what to do if the prior is not compatible with the observed data. To this end, we review and extend methods to adaptively weight the prior distribution. We relate empirical Bayes estimates of prior weight to Box's p-value and propose alternative fully Bayesian approaches. Prior weighting can be done for the joint prior distribution of the regression coefficients or - under prior independence - separately for each regression coefficient or for pre-specified blocks of regression coefficients. We outline how the proposed methodology can be implemented using integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA) and illustrate the applicability with a logistic and a log-linear Poisson multiple regression model.