Bayesian model comparison and the BIC for regression models

In the signal processing literature, many methods have been proposed for solving the important model comparison and selection problem. However, most of these methods only find the most likely model or only work well under particular circumstances such as a large number of data points or a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). One of the most successful classes of methods is the Bayesian information criteria (BIC) and in this paper, we extend some of the recent work on the BIC. In particular, we develop methods in a full Bayesian framework which work well across a large/small number of data points and high/low SNR for either real- or complex-valued data originating from a regression model. Aside from selecting the most probable model, these rules can also be used for model averaging as they assign a probability to each candidate model. Through simulations on a polynomial trend model, we demonstrate that the proposed rules outperform other rules in terms of detecting the true model order, de-noising the noisy signal, and making predictions of unobserved data points. The simulation code is available online.