{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/conjugate-priors-and-bias-reduction-for","title":"Conjugate priors and bias reduction for logistic regression models","arxiv_id":"2202.08734","date":"2022-02-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tommaso Rigon","Emanuele Aliverti"],"abstract":"Logistic regression models for binomial responses are routinely used in statistical practice. However, the maximum likelihood estimate may not exist due to data separability. We address this issue by considering a conjugate prior penalty which always produces finite estimates. Such a specification has a clear Bayesian interpretation and enjoys several invariance properties, making it an appealing prior choice. We show that the proposed method leads to an accurate approximation of the reduced-bias approach of Firth (1993), resulting in estimators with smaller asymptotic bias than the maximum-likelihood and whose existence is always guaranteed. Moreover, the considered penalized likelihood can be expressed as a genuine likelihood, in which the original data are replaced with a collection of pseudo-counts. Hence, our approach may leverage well established and scalable algorithms for logistic regression. We compare our estimator with alternative reduced-bias methods, vastly improving their computational performance and achieving appealing inferential results.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08734v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.08734v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"conjugate-priors-and-bias-reduction-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/tommasorigon/logistic-bias-reduction","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}