Lewandowski-Kurowicka-Joe distribution

In probability theory and Bayesian statistics, the Lewandowski-Kurowicka-Joe distribution, often referred to as the LKJ distribution, is a probability distribution over positive definite symmetric matrices with unit diagonals.

Introduction

The LKJ distribution was first introduced in 2009 in a more general context by Daniel Lewandowski, Dorota Kurowicka, and Harry Joe. It is an example of the vine copula, an approach to constrained high-dimensional probability distributions.

The distribution has a single shape parameter $\eta$ and the probability density function for a $d\times d$ matrix $𝐑$ is

$p(𝐑;\eta )=C\times [\det (𝐑){]}^{\eta -1}$

with normalizing constant $C=2^{\sum _{k=1}^{d-1}(2\eta -2+d-k)(d-k)}\prod _{k=1}^{d-1}{\left[B(\eta +(d-k-1)/2,\eta +(d-k-1)/2)\right]}^{d-k}$, a complicated expression including a product over Beta functions. For $\eta =1$, the distribution is uniform over the space of all correlation matrices; i.e. the space of positive definite matrices with unit diagonal.

Usage

The LKJ distribution is commonly used as a prior for correlation matrix in Bayesian hierarchical modeling. Bayesian hierarchical modeling often tries to make an inference on the covariance structure of the data, which can be decomposed into a scale vector and correlation matrix. Instead of the prior on the covariance matrix such as the inverse-Wishart distribution, LKJ distribution can serve as a prior on the correlation matrix along with some suitable prior distribution on the scale vector. It has been implemented in several probabilistic programming languages, including Stan and PyMC.

External links

• Described as part of the Stan manual
• distribution-explorer

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