Welcome to Winter

Hello All,

Bayes Club will meet for the first time on Tuesday, 2014-01-14, and on even weeks after that (alternating with R Club). How exciting!

In our first meeting, before diving into “How Bayes?”, we will be discussing “Why Bayes?” If possible, by Tuesday, please take a look at the following reading(s), which can be found on the Syllabus page:

• Kruschke, J. K. (2010). Bayesian data analysis. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(5), 658Ð676. doi:10.1002/wcs.72 [pdf]
• If you have time: A practical and pithy post by Andrew Gelman on the practice of Bayesian stats in psychology, with links to several relevant articles and discussion.

Rose wrote up an excellent introduction to the logistics of the term in an R Club post here. Everything said in that post applies to Bayes Club, so take a look, especially if you’ve signed up for credit for the course.

As mentioned in Rose’s post above, we will unfortunately not be meeting in a computer lab this term. Thus, if possible, please bring a laptop with you to our meetings.

The code examples that we’ll be discussing this term require the use of three pieces of software: R, JAGS (“Just Another Gibbs Sampler”), and rjags, an R package that allows R and JAGS to speak to one another. Please try to install these by Tuesday the 14th, or at least by our following meeting. I’ve written up a post on the installation process here for you; please feel free to comment on it to bring up any questions or difficulties that you experience, so that we can all try to figure out answers together.

Looking forward to seeing you! I have good reason to believe that we’ll have a credibly good time*!

* If you don’t understand that weak joke yet, then all learning objectives for the course will be met if you do by Finals Week.