Following on from his talk at StanCon, Michael Betancourt just wrote three Stan case studies, all of which are must reads: Diagnosing Biased Inference with Divergences: This case study discusses the subtleties of accurate Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation and how divergences can be used to identify biased estimation in practice. Identifying Bayesian Mixture […] The post A fistful of Stan case studies: divergences and bias, identifying mixtures, and…
Hello there ! While I was in Amsterdam, I took the opportunity to go and work with the Leiden crowd, an more particularly with Stéphanie van der Pas and Johannes Schmidt-Heiber. Since Stéphanie had already obtained neat results for the Horseshoe prior and Johannes had obtained some super cool results for the spike and slab prior, […]
Hello there ! While I was in Amsterdam, I took the opportunity to go and work with the Leiden crowd, an more particularly with Stéphanie van der Pas and Johannes Schmidt-Heiber. Since Stéphanie had already obtained neat results for the Horseshoe prior and Johannes had obtained some super cool results for the spike and slab prior, […]
There remains a bit of a two-way snobbery that Frequentist statistics is what we teach (as so-called objective statistics remain the same no matter who works with them) and Bayesian statistics is what we do (as it tends to directly estimate posterior probabilities we are actually interested in). Nina Zumel hit the nail on the … Continue reading Baking priors
Andrew Gelman weighs in on the Wishart issue discussed here previously – should people be using (scaled) inverse Wishart priors? The basic problem that prompted my post and Matt Simpson’s follow-up was that the inverse Wishart prior makes correlation and scale dependent, so that when looking at two effects and you might get […]
A while ago I wrote this post with some R code to visualize the updating of a beta distribution as the outcome of Bernoulli trials are observed. The code provided a single plot of this process, with all the curves overlayed on top of one another. Then John Myles White (co-author of Machine Learning for
