Bayesian Semiparametric Covariate Informed Multivariate Density Deconvolution

Abstract

Estimating the marginal and joint densities of the long-term average intakes of different dietary components is an important problem in nutritional epidemiology. Since these variables cannot be directly measured, data are usually collected in the form of 24-hour recalls of the intakes. The problem of estimating the density of the latent long-term average intakes from their observed but error contaminated recalls then becomes a problem of multivariate deconvolution of densities. The underlying densities could potentially vary with the subjects’ demographic characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, age, etc. The problem of density deconvolution in the presence of associated precisely measured covariates has, however, never been considered before, not even in the univariate setting. We present a flexible Bayesian semiparametric approach to covariate informed multivariate deconvolution. Building on recent advances on copula deconvolution and conditional tensor factorization techniques, our proposed method not only allows the joint and the marginal densities to vary flexibly with the associated predictors but also allows automatic selection of the most influential predictors. Importantly, the method also allows the density of interest and the density of the measurement errors to vary with potentially different sets of predictors. We design Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms that enable efficient posterior inference, appropriately accommodating uncertainty in all aspects of our analysis. The empirical efficacy of the proposed method is illustrated through simulation experiments. Its practical utility is demonstrated in the afore-described nutritional epidemiology applications in estimating covariate adjusted long term intakes of different dietary components. An important by-product of the approach is a solution to covariate informed ordinary multivariate density estimation. Supplementary materials include substantive additional details and R codes are also available online.