Many of the posts in this blog have been concerned with using MCMC based methods for Bayesian inference. These methods are typically “exact” in the sense that they have the exact posterior distribution of interest as their target equilibrium distribution, but are obviously “approximate”, in that for any finite amount of computing time, we can […]
Bayesian variable selection In a previous post I gave a quick introduction to using the rjags R package to access the JAGS Bayesian inference from within R. In this post I want to give a quick guide to using rjags for Bayesian variable selection. I intend to use this post as a starting point for […]
R is included as part of the standard Ubuntu distribution, and can be installed with a command like Obviously the software included as part of the standard distribution usually lags a little behind the latest version, and this is usually quite acceptable for most users most of the time. However, R is evolving quite quickly […]
JAGS (Just Another Gibbs Sampler) is a general purpose MCMC engine similar to WinBUGS and OpenBUGS. I have a slight preference for JAGS as it is free and portable, works well on Linux, and interfaces well with R. It is tempting to write a tutorial introduction to JAGS and the corresponding R package, rjags, but […]
I’ve recently taken delivery of a Raspberry Pi mini computer. For anyone who doesn’t know, this is a low cost, low power machine, costing around 20 GBP (25 USD) and consuming around 2.5 Watts of power (it is powered by micro-USB). This amazing little device can run linux very adequately, and so naturally I’ve been […]
Introduction Very often it is desirable to use Metropolis Hastings MCMC for a target distribution which does not have full support (for example, it may correspond to a non-negative random variable), using a proposal distribution which does (for example, a Gaussian random walk proposal). This isn’t a problem at all, but on more than one […]
Introduction As I’ve explained previously, I’m gradually coming around to the idea of using Java for the development of MCMC codes, and I’m starting to build up a collection of simple examples for getting started. One of the advantages of Java is that it includes a standard cross-platform GUI library. This might not seem like […]
I’ve been very quiet on-line in the last few months, due mainly to the fact that I’ve been writing a new undergraduate course on multivariate data analysis. Although there are many books and on-line notes on the general topic of multivariate statistics, I wanted to do something a little bit different from any text I […]
This is my 25th blog post, so this seems like a good time to provide an index to those first 25 posts for ease of reference. I’ve covered a range of topics over my first two years of blogging, and managed to average almost one post per month, as suggested in my first post. Due […]
Introduction In a previous post I showed how to construct a PMMH pMCMC algorithm for parameter estimation with partially observed Markov processes. The inner loop of a pMCMC algorithm consists of running a particle filter to construct an unbiased estimate of marginal likelihood. This inner loop is the place where the code spends almost all […]
