Mixture of Species Sampling Models

Abstract

We introduce mixtures of species sampling sequences (mSSS) and discuss how these sequences are related to various types of Bayesian models. As a particular case, we recover species sampling sequences with general (not necessarily diffuse) base measures. These models include some “spike-and-slab” non-parametric priors recently introduced to provide sparsity. Furthermore, we show how mSSS arise while considering hierarchical species sampling random probabilities (e.g., the hierarchical Dirichlet process). Extending previous results, we prove that mSSS are obtained by assigning the values of an exchangeable sequence to the classes of a latent exchangeable random partition. Using this representation, we give an explicit expression of the Exchangeable Partition Probability Function of the partition generated by an mSSS. Some special cases are discussed in detail—in particular, species sampling sequences with general base measures and a mixture of species sampling sequences with Gibbs-type latent partition. Finally, we give explicit expressions of the predictive distributions of an mSSS.