Elicitation of Prior Distributions for Variable-Selection Problems in Regression

This paper addresses the problem of quantifying expert opinion about a normal linear regression model when there is uncertainty as to which independent variables should be included in the model. Opinion is modeled as a mixture of natural conjugate prior distributions with each distribution in the mixture corresponding to a different subset of the independent variables. It is shown that for certain values of the independent variables, the predictive distribution of the dependent variable simplifies from a mixture of t-distributions to a single t-distribution. Using this result, a method of eliciting the conjugate distributions of the mixture is developed. The method is illustrated in an example.