A Bernstein-von Mises Theorem for Generalized Fiducial Distributions

Abstract

An established and growing literature on generalized fiducial inference and related fiducial ideas points to the adoption of fiducial inference as a mainstream perspective among modern statisticians. Like Bayesian posteriors, generalized fiducial distributions (GFDs) are known to satisfy Bernstein-von Mises (BvM)-type results under classical regularity conditions. Existing fiducial BvM results, however, rely on relatively restrictive smoothness assumptions and are limited in scope. In this paper, we establish a Bernstein-von Mises theorem for generalized fiducial inference under the general framework of local asymptotic normality, which accommodates non-i.i.d. data settings and reduces to the familiar differentiability in quadratic mean condition in the i.i.d. case. We apply our result to extend existing fiducial theory for free-knot spline models first developed in Sonderegger and Hannig (2014), and further illustrate its generality in models where classical regularity conditions fail or i.i.d. assumptions are not met.