Bayes Club Agenda

Hi all,

For our first meeting this term (today, 3:00-4:20 in Franklin 271A), we’ll go over the following topics:

1. Quick-n-dirty intro to Bayes: A refresher for those of us who haven’t been thinking about this since Spring, and a baptism by fire for those of us who are brand new. 😉 We’ll touch on some basic vocab and concepts, including possibly using this demonstration: http://setosa.io/conditional/

2. Planning this term’s schedule: The goal is to get a list of mini presentations lined up (“nuggets”, for those of you familiar with this practice in R Club). We’d love everyone to sign up for at least one little informal presentation. You can plan to talk about an article, a question or a problem you’ve run into, or you can plan to share something you’ve learned or figured out that you think would be of interest to the group. It can be long and complicated, or very quick and basic. The idea is to give each of us an excuse to do a little prep/thinking/reading/futzing with Bayes stuff outside of Bayes club at least once over the course of the term. The best way to learn is to do, after all!

3. Today’s nugget: Bayes by hand! Yep, over the summer, I (Rose) learned how to actually do Bayesian analysis by hand, and with real distributions (not just toy examples with coin flips). It’s a mess, but it was super helpful for me in terms of building my understanding of how Bayes’ theorem actually works in a practical sense, so I figured I would try it as a demonstration for Bayes Club. Bring a pencil, and brace yourself.