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April 8, 2010

MCMC Sampling Stuff

I love reading Andrew Gelman's blog; it's a great mixture of serious statistical thought, practical data analysis questions, random personal musings, and links to the rest of the stats blogosphere. Gelman is a very smart, famous Bayesian and advisor to our own Cavan Reilly.

He recently wrote two posts about MCMC sampling that you might find interesting/useful.

One is some second-hand skepticism about a recent paper (published in the first post-Brad issue of Bayesian Analysis) on a new Metropolis sampler that doesn't require tuning.

The other is an extended reaction to a talk by Charlie Geyer (from the UofM Stats Department) about convergence issues.

January 28, 2010

R Tutorial

Here are the materials I will be using in class Thursday, January 28, 2010 for the R tutorial:

Online Presentation

Demo R Code File (and test.R)

And here are the materials/websites that I reference:

CRAN (download R and packages)
R Seek (custom search engine for R materials)
R Reference Card (PDF quick reference-- super awesome)
Graph Gallery

Extra stuff:
JAGS (run BUGS models via R independently of WinBUGS/OpenBUGS)
R2WinBUGS (run WinBUGS from R)
BRugs (run OpenBUGS from R)
Instructions for WinBUGS and OpenBUGS on Mac OS X using WINE