University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 7-6-2015 Applications of Bregman Divergence Measures in Bayesian Modeling Gyuhyeong Goh University of Connecticut - Storrs,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Goh, Gyuhyeong, "Applications of Bregman Divergence Measures in Bayesian Modeling" (2015). Doctoral Dissertations. 785. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/785 Applications of Bregman Divergence Measures in Bayesian Modeling Gyuhyeong Goh, Ph.D. University of Connecticut, 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation has mainly focused on the development of statistical theory, methodology, and application from a Bayesian perspective using a general class of di- vergence measures (or loss functions), called Bregman divergence. Many applications of Bregman divergence have played a key role in recent advances in machine learn- ing. My goal is to turn the spotlight on Bregman divergence and its applications in Bayesian modeling. Since Bregman divergence includes many well-known loss func- tions such as squared error loss, Kullback-Leibler divergence, Itakura-Saito distance, and Mahalanobis distance, the theoretical and methodological development unify and extend many existing Bayesian methods. The broad applicability of both Bregman divergence and Bayesian approach can handle diverse types of data such as circular data, high-dimensional data, multivariate data and functional data. Furthermore,