There has been a dramatic growth in the development and application of Bayesian inferential methods. Some of this growth is due to the availability of powerful simulation-based algorithms to summarize posterior distributions. There has been also a growing interest in the use of the system R for statistical analyses. R's open source nature, free availability, and large number of contributor packages have made R the software of choice for many statisticians in education and industry. "Bayesian Computation with R" introduces Bayesian modeling by the use of computation using the R language. The early chapters present the basic tenets of Bayesian thinking by use of familiar one and two-parameter inferential problems. Bayesian computational methods such as Laplace's method, rejection sampling, and the SIR algorithm are illustrated in the context of a random effects model. The construction and implementation of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods is introduced. These simulation-based algorithms are implemented for a variety of Bayesian applications such as normal and binary response regression, hierarchical modeling, order-restricted inference, and robust modeling.
Algorithms written in R are used to develop Bayesian tests and assess Bayesian models by use of the posterior predictive distribution. The use of R to interface with WinBUGS, a popular MCMC computing language, is described with several illustrative examples. This book is a suitable companion book for an introductory course on Bayesian methods and is valuable to the statistical practitioner who wishes to learn more about the R language and Bayesian methodology. The LearnBayes package, written by the author and available from the CRAN website, contains all of the R functions described in the book. The second edition contains several new topics such as the use of mixtures of conjugate priors and the use of Zellner's g priors to choose between models in linear regression. There are more illustrations of the construction of informative prior distributions, such as the use of conditional means priors and multivariate normal priors in binary regressions. The new edition contains changes in the R code illustrations according to the latest edition of the LearnBayes package.

R by Example

by Jim Albert and Maria Rizzo

Published 23 November 2011

R by Example is an example-based introduction to the statistical computing environment that does not assume any previous familiarity with R or other software packages. R functions are presented in the context of interesting applications with real data.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate a range of statistical and probability computations using R for people who are learning, teaching, or using statistics. Specifically, this book is written for users who have covered at least the equivalent of (or are currently studying) undergraduate level calculus-based courses in statistics. These users are learning or applying exploratory and inferential methods for analyzing data and this book is intended to be a useful resource for learning how to implement these procedures in R.