Last year the International Society for Bayesian Analysis launched a new section on Bayesian Computing. The BayesComp section now has its own “website of information, tools, and advice as an authoritative central resource” at bayescomp.wikidot.com.
If you are not already a member of BayesComp then you should definitely think about joining. See the ISBA web site for more details.
Last year, the first French-speaking R conference, “Rencontres R“ was held in Bordeaux. The meeting was a great success, and a second one will be held in Lyon on 27 and 28 June 2013.
The abstract submission deadline of 7 April is fast approaching. Three types of presentation are planned for the meeting:
To submit an abstract, follow the instructions on the conference web site.
Statistical Practice in Epidemiology with R is a one week course aimed at promoting the use of R among epidemiologists. This annual course has been running almost every year since 2004. This year, the course will take place from 23 to 29 May 2012 at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France.
For more details about the course, including how to apply, see the SPE home page. The deadline for applications is April 1 2013.
The JAGS-Wiener module by Dominik Wabersich and Joachim Vandekerckhove extends JAGS by adding the distribution “dweiner” for the the first passage time of a drift diffusion process. As far as I know, this is the first third-party JAGS extension that is distributed as a standalone module [1]. You can download the source code from sourceforge, and for Windows users, there is a binary installer.
Dominik and Joachim have documented the process of putting together the JAGS-Wiener module in a tutorial article, which is now submitted to Behavior Research Methods. This article fills a much needed gap in the documentation, and will hopefully encourage others interested in extending JAGS to follow suit.
[1] There is also the lossDev package for R, distributed via CRAN, which also includes JAGS extensions. This is a little different as it is tied to the R interface.
Bob O’Hara has written a nice article for The Guardian explaining the statistical techniques underlying Nate Silver’s remarkably accurate predictions of the US presidential election. Bayes’ Theorem and hierarchical modelling both get a name check, but there are no equations. The article also includes a selection of #natesilverfacts.
Xavier Fernández i Marín, who maintains the jags package on Gentoo Linux, writes to tell me he is developing the R package ggmcmc. This package is for visualizing Markov Chain Monte Carlo output using ggplot2 graphics and should complement the existing plots for base and lattice graphics provided by coda. A comparison of all three graphical styles is given below. Continue reading
Bill Northcott’s binary distribution of JAGS 3.3.0 for Mac OS X is now available. This distribution supports 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and 10.7 (Lion). As explained by Bill in the installation manual, changes in Apple’s developer tools make it difficult to support earlier versions.
