Easy and Efficient Bayesian Infinite Factor Analysis

Abstract

<p>Bayesian latent factor models are key tools for modeling linear structure in data and performing dimension reduction for correlated variables. Recent advances in prior specification allow the estimation of semi- and non-parametric infinite factor mod- els. These models provide significant theoretical and practical advantages at the cost of computationally intensive sampling and non-identifiability of some parameters. We provide a package for the R programming environment that includes functions for sampling from the posterior distributions of several recent latent factor mod- els. These computationally efficient samplers are provided for R with C++ source code to facilitate fast sampling of standard models and provide component sam- pling functions for more complex models. We also present an efficient algorithm to remove the non-identifiability that results from the included shrinkage priors. The infinitefactor package is available in developmental version on GitHub at https://github.com/poworoznek/infinitefactor and in release version on the CRAN package repository.</p>