Bayesian estimation of cluster covariance matrices of unknown form

We develop a flexible Bayesian model for cluster covariance matrices in large dimensions where the number of clusters and the assignment of cross-sectional units to a cluster are a-priori unknown and estimated from the data. In a cluster covariance matrix, the variances and covariances are equal within each diagonal block, while the covariances are equal in each off-diagonal block. This reduces the number of parameters by pooling those parameters together that are in the same cluster. In order to treat the number of clusters and the cluster assignments as unknowns, we build a random partition model which assigns a prior distribution over the space of partitions of the data into clusters. Sampling from the posterior over the space of partitions creates a flexible estimator because it averages across a wide set of cluster covariance matrices. We illustrate our methods on linear factor models and large vector autoregressions.