The conjugate prior for discrete hierarchical log-linear models

Abstract

In the Bayesian analysis of contingency table data, the selection of a prior distribution for either the log-linear parameters or the cell probabilities parameter is a major challenge. Though the conjugate prior on cell probabilities has been defined by Dawid and Lauritzen (1993) for decomposable graphical models, it has not been identified for the larger class of graphical models Markov with respect to an arbitrary undirected graph or for the even wider class of hierarchical log-linear models. In this paper, working with the log-linear parameters used by GLIM, we first define the conjugate prior for these parameters and then derive the induced prior for the cell probabilities: this is done for the general class of hierarchical log-linear models. We show that the conjugate prior has all the properties that one expects from a prior: notational simplicity, ability to reflect either no prior knowledge or a priori expert knowledge, a moderate number of hyperparameters and mathematical convenience. It also has the strong hyper Markov property which allows for local updates within prime components for graphical models.