Bayesian dimensionality reduction

We are currently witnessing an explosion in the amount of available data. Such growth involves not only the number of data points but also their dimensionality. This poses new challenges to statistical modeling and computations, thus making dimensionality reduction more central than ever. In the present thesis, we provide methodological, computational and theoretical advancements in Bayesian dimensionality reduction via novel structured priors. Namely, we develop a new increasing shrinkage prior and illustrate how it can be employed to discard redundant dimensions in Gaussian factor models. In order to make it usable for larger datasets, we also investigate variational methods for posterior inference under this proposed prior. Beyond traditional models and parameter spaces, we also provide a different take on dimensionality reduction, focusing on community detection in networks. For this purpose, we define a general class of Bayesian nonparametric priors that encompasses existing stochastic block models as special cases and includes promising unexplored options. Our Bayesian approach allows for a natural incorporation of node attributes and facilitates uncertainty quantification as well as model selection.