Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: On the Evidence for Cosmic Variation of the Fine Structure Constant
  (II): A Semi-Parametric Bayesian Model Selection Analysis of the Quasar
  Dataset   In the second paper of this series we extend our Bayesian reanalysis of the
evidence for a cosmic variation of the fine structure constant to the
semi-parametric modelling regime. By adopting a mixture of Dirichlet processes
prior for the unexplained errors in each instrumental subgroup of the benchmark
quasar dataset we go some way towards freeing our model selection procedure
from the apparent subjectivity of a fixed distributional form. Despite the
infinite-dimensional domain of the error hierarchy so constructed we are able
to demonstrate a recursive scheme for marginal likelihood estimation with
prior-sensitivity analysis directly analogous to that presented in Paper I,
thereby allowing the robustness of our posterior Bayes factors to
hyper-parameter choice and model specification to be readily verified. In the
course of this work we elucidate various similarities between unexplained error
problems in the seemingly disparate fields of astronomy and clinical
meta-analysis, and we highlight a number of sophisticated techniques for
handling such problems made available by past research in the latter. It is our
hope that the novel approach to semi-parametric model selection demonstrated
herein may serve as a useful reference for others exploring this potentially
difficult class of error model.

3
The categories of this paper are: physics
18
The categories of this paper are: econ
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
12
The categories of this paper are: nucl-th
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
2
The categories of this paper are: math
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph