Suppose we would like to learn the relationship between y and a high
dimensional vector x based on a limited number of observations. In
"BART: Bayesian Additive Regression Trees" (2006), Chipman, George and
McCulloch develop a fully Bayesian approach for discovering and
drawing inference about an unknown function f based only on assuming y =
f(x) + o with iid normal errors. In the spirit of "ensemble models",
BART approximates f by a sum of many simple regression tree models, each
of which are kept small with a strong regularization prior. In terms of
out-of-sample prediction, BART's performance compares favorably with
competing methods. Posterior evaluation by a well-mixing MCMC algorithm
allows for the natural Bayesian quantification of uncertainty about f.
Further, the modular nature of BART facilitates its embedding within
larger hierarchical models (for example, see Zhang, Shih and Mueller
2006). In this work, we further extend the flexibility of the BART
approach by relaxing the simple iid normal error specification and re-
placing it with a Dirichlet process model for the errors. Various speci-
fication and prior choices are explored. The costs as well as the
benefits of this more flexible approach are illustrated.