Jean-Michel Marin visited me in Paris last week and, besides taking part in Pierre’s PhD defence, we made enough progress to close two more chapters of the new edition of Bayesian Core (soon to be Bayesian Essentials with R!) This follows the good work session we had in Carnon ... [Read more...]

Bill Bolstad wrote a reply to my review of his book Understanding computational Bayesian statistics last week and here it is, unedited except for the first paragraph where he thanks me for the opportunity to respond, “so readers will see that the book has some good features beyond having a “... [Read more...]

I have just finished reading this book by Bill Bolstad (University of Waikato, New Zealand) which a previous ‘Og post pointed out when it appeared, shortly after our Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R. My family commented that the cover was nicer than those of my own books, which is ... [Read more...]

An announcement for two short-courses on Introduction to  Bayesian Analysis and MCMC, and Hierarchical Modelling of Spatial and Temporal Data by Alan Gelfand (Duke University, USA) and Sujit Sahu (University of Southampton, UK), are to take place in Southampton on June 7-10, this year. Course 1: Introduction to Bayesian Analysis and ... [Read more...]

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Over the two days of the Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop, we managed to cover normal models, testing, regression, Gibbs sampling, generalised linear models, Metropolis-Hastings algorithms and of course a fair dose of hierarchical modelling. At the end of the Saturday marathon session, we spent one and half discussing ... [Read more...]

Yesterday night, we started the  Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop by trading stories. Everyone involved in the programme discussed his/her favourite dataset and corresponding expectations from the course. I found the exchange most interesting, like the one we had two years ago in Gran Paradiso, because of the ... [Read more...]