Series: Springer Texts in Statistics

Hoff, Peter D.
2009, VIII, 268 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-387-92299-7
Usually dispatched within 3 to 5 business days

About this textbook

• Provides a nice introduction to Bayesian statistics with sufficient grounding in the Bayesian framework without being distracted by more esoteric points
• The material is well-organized; weaving applications, background material and computation discussions throughout the book
• R examples also facilitate how the approaches work

This book provides a compact self-contained introduction to the theory and application of Bayesian statistical methods. The book is accessible to readers having a basic familiarity with probability, yet allows more advanced readers to quickly grasp the principles underlying Bayesian theory and methods. The examples and computer code allow the reader to understand and implement basic Bayesian data analyses using standard statistical models and to extend the standard models to specialized data analysis situations. The book begins with fundamental notions such as probability, exchangeability and Bayes' rule, and ends with modern topics such as variable selection in regression, generalized linear mixed effects models, and semiparametric copula estimation. Numerous examples from the social, biological and physical sciences show how to implement these methodologies in practice.
Monte Carlo summaries of posterior distributions play an important role in Bayesian data analysis. The open-source R statistical computing environment provides sufficient functionality to make Monte Carlo estimation very easy for a large number of statistical models and example R-code is provided throughout the text. Much of the example code can be run ``as is'' in R, and essentially all of it can be run after downloading the relevant datasets from the companion website for this book.
Peter Hoff is an Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington. He has developed a variety of Bayesian methods for multivariate data, including covariance and copula estimation, cluster analysis, mixture modeling and social network analysis. He is on the editorial board of the Annals of Applied Statistics.

Content Level » Graduate
Keywords » MCMC - exchangeability - hierarchical model - prediction - variable selection
Related subjects » Database Management & Information Retrieval - Econometrics / Statistics - Operations Research & Decision Theory - Statistical Theory and Methods - Theoretical Computer Science

Reviews

This is an excellent book for its intended audience: statisticians who wish to learn Bayesian methods. Although designed for a statistics audience, it would also be a good book for econometricians who have been trained in frequentist methods, but wish to learn Bayes. In relatively few pages, it takes the reader through a vast amount of material, beginning with deep issues in statistical methodology such as de Finetti’s theorem, through the nitty-gritty of Bayesian computation to sophisticated models such as generalized linear mixed effects models and copulas. And it does so in a simple manner, always drawing parallels and contrasts between Bayesian and frequentist methods, so as to allow the reader to see the similarities and differences with clarity. (Econometrics Journal)



A First Course in Bayesian Statistical Methods

G. Casella
S. Fienberg
I. Olkin

2009     269pages

Contents
1 Introduction and examples . . . . . . . . 1
2 Belief, probability and exchangeability . . . . . . . 13
3 One-parameter models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4 Monte Carlo approximation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5 The normal model . . . . . . . .  . . 67
6 Posterior approximation with the Gibbs sampler . . . . . . . . . . 89
7 The multivariate normal model . . . . . . 105
8 Group comparisons and hierarchical modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
9 Linear regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
10 Nonconjugate priors and Metropolis-Hastings algorithms . . 171
11 Linear and generalized linear mixed effects models . . . . . . . . . 195
12 Latent variable methods for ordinal data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Common distributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267