Sequential Bayesian inference with correlated heavy-ion datasets

TL;DR

This paper examines how correlations between datasets affect sequential Bayesian inference, demonstrating that ignoring correlations leads to biased results and proposing a diagnostic method to assess and address this issue.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of the impact of dataset correlations on Bayesian inference and offers a practical diagnostic tool for ensuring consistent updates.

Findings

Factorized updates deviate from joint posteriors with increasing correlation.

Conditional updates remain consistent regardless of correlation.

An information decomposition explains how correlations redistribute dataset information.

Abstract

Bayesian inference provides a natural framework for updating knowledge as new information becomes available, often in a sequential manner by incorporating datasets in stages or reusing previous posteriors as priors. In practice, this is commonly implemented using a factorized update in which datasets are treated as conditionally independent. When datasets are statistically correlated, however, this approximation becomes inconsistent with the joint likelihood and can lead to biased posterior estimates. In this work, we investigate this issue in a controlled setting using pseudo-data with a tunable covariance structure. We compare joint inference, factorized sequential updating, and a formulation based on the exact conditional likelihood. We show that factorized updates reproduce the joint posterior only in the limit of conditional independence, and otherwise lead to systematic deviations that grow with the correlation strength, while conditional updates remain consistent with the joint result. To interpret these deviations, we introduce an information decomposition that separates contributions into components that are new and components that are redundant across datasets. We show that correlations induce a structured, parameter-dependent redistribution of information, governed by the overlap of dataset sensitivities. The resulting mismatch between marginal and conditional information quantitatively explains the observed deviations. These results provide a practical diagnostic for assessing the consistency of sequential Bayesian inference with correlated datasets and highlight the need for a consistent treatment of correlations within a common probabilistic framework.