Plotting MCMC draws using the bayesplot package

Plots for MCMC draws

The bayesplot package provides various plotting functions for visualizing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) draws from the posterior distribution of the parameters of a Bayesian model.

In this vignette we’ll use draws obtained using the stan_glm function in the rstanarm package (Gabry and Goodrich, 2016), but MCMC draws from using any package can be used with the functions in the bayesplot package. See, for example, brms (which, like rstanarm, calls the rstan package internally to use Stan’s MCMC sampler).

library("rstanarm")
fit <- stan_glm(
  mpg ~ ., # ~ . includes all other variables in dataset
  data = mtcars, 
  chains = 4, 
  iter = 2000,
  seed = 1111
)
print(fit)

stan_glm(formula = mpg ~ ., data = mtcars, chains = 4, iter = 2000, 
    seed = 1111)

Estimates:
            Median MAD_SD
(Intercept) 12.2   19.2  
cyl         -0.1    1.0  
disp         0.0    0.0  
hp           0.0    0.0  
drat         0.8    1.7  
wt          -3.7    1.9  
qsec         0.8    0.7  
vs           0.2    2.2  
am           2.5    2.1  
gear         0.6    1.5  
carb        -0.2    0.8  
sigma        2.7    0.4  

Sample avg. posterior predictive 
distribution of y (X = xbar):
         Median MAD_SD
mean_PPD 20.1    0.7  

Observations: 32  Number of unconstrained parameters: 12

To use the posterior draws with the functions in the bayesplot package we’ll extract them from the fitted model object:

posterior <- as.array(fit)
dim(posterior)

[1] 1000    4   12

dimnames(posterior)

$iterations
NULL

$chains
[1] "chain:1" "chain:2" "chain:3" "chain:4"

$parameters
 [1] "(Intercept)" "cyl"         "disp"        "hp"          "drat"       
 [6] "wt"          "qsec"        "vs"          "am"          "gear"       
[11] "carb"        "sigma"

Interval estimates

Posterior intervals for the parameters can be plotted using the mcmc_intervals function.

library("bayesplot")
color_scheme_set("red")
mcmc_intervals(posterior, pars = c("cyl", "drat", "am", "sigma"))

The default is to show 50% intervals (the thick lines) and 90% intervals (the thinner outer lines). These defaults can be changed using the prob and prob_outer arguments, respectively. The points in the above plot are posterior medians. The point_est argument can be used to select posterior means instead or to omit the point estimates.

To show the uncertainty intervals as shaded areas under the estimated posterior density curves we can use the mcmc_areas function:

mcmc_areas(
  posterior, 
  pars = c("cyl", "drat", "am", "sigma"),
  prob = 0.8, # 80% intervals
  prob_outer = 0.99, # 99%
  point_est = "mean"
)

Histograms and density estimates

Histograms or kernel density estimates of posterior distributions of the various model parameters can be visualized using the functions described on the MCMC-distributions page in the bayesplot documentation.

Histograms

The mcmc_hist and mcmc_dens functions plot posterior distributions (combining all chains):

color_scheme_set("green")
mcmc_hist(posterior, pars = c("wt", "am"))

mcmc_dens(posterior, pars = c("wt", "am"))

To view the four Markov chain separately we can use mcmc_hist_by_chain, mcmc_dens_overlay:

color_scheme_set("brightblue")
mcmc_hist_by_chain(posterior, pars = c("wt", "am"))

mcmc_dens_overlay(posterior, pars = c("wt", "am"))

The mcmc_violin function also plots the density estimates of each chain as violins with horizontal lines at user-specified quantiles:

mcmc_violin(posterior, pars = c("wt", "am"), probs = c(0.1, 0.5, 0.9))

Scatterplots

The mcmc_scatter function creates a scatterplot with two parameters:

color_scheme_set("gray")
mcmc_scatter(posterior, pars = c("(Intercept)", "wt"), size = 1.5, alpha = 0.5)

In addition to mcmc_scatter, an mcmc_pairs functions for creating pairs plots with more than two parameters will be available in one of the next releases of the package.

Traceplots

The mcmc_trace function creates standard traceplots:

color_scheme_set("blue")
mcmc_trace(posterior, pars = c("wt", "sigma"))

If it’s hard to see the difference between the chains we can change to a mixed color scheme, for example:

color_scheme_set("mix-blue-red")
mcmc_trace(posterior, pars = c("wt", "sigma"))

The mcmc_trace_highlight uses points instead of lines and reduces the opacity of all but a single chain (which is specified using the highlight argument).

mcmc_trace_highlight(posterior, pars = c("wt", "sigma"), highlight = 3)