Title: A Bayesian nonparametric approach to log-concave density estimation,
Abstract: The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical
problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a
Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated
Dirichlet process mixture prior and show that the posterior distribution
converges to the log-concave truth at the (near-) minimax rate in Hellinger
distance. Our proof proceeds by establishing a general contraction result based
on the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator that prevents the need for
further metric entropy calculations. We also present two computationally more
feasible approximations and a more practical empirical Bayes approach, which
are illustrated numerically via simulations.