Bayesian shrinkage towards sharp minimaxity (Q2192317)

A very interesting question in literature is how the global shrinkage parameter, i.e., the scale parameter, in a heavy tailed prior affects the posterior contraction. The question of this work is the following: how the shape of the prior, or more specifically, the polynomial order of the prior tail affects the posterior. The answer is positive so they found out: under the sparse normal means model, the polynomial order does affect the multiplicative constant of the posterior contraction rate. More importantly, if the polynomial order is sufficiently close to 1, it will induce the optimal Bayesian posterior convergence in the sense that the Bayesian contraction rate is sharply minimax, i.e., not only the order, but also the multiplicative constant of the posterior contraction rate are optimal. This is a rather interesting statement. The above Bayesian sharp minimaxity holds when the global shrinkage parameter follows a deterministic choice which depends on the unknown sparsity $s$. Therefore, a beta-prior modeling is further proposed, such that their sharply minimax Bayesian procedure is adaptive to the unknown $s$. Numerical examples are given to justify the theoretical results.