Bayesianz Research Group: What's been happening

• 13 Aug 2014. Brendon Brewer on "Trans-dimensional Bayesian Inference and Nested Sampling" (i.e., how to make your reversible jump even jumpier!).
• 27 Aug 2014. Russell Millar on foundations of inference "Shaky foundations: what they don't tell you as an under-grad". pdf slides here
• 10 Sept 2014. Alex Popinga on "Sticky stochastic inference in infectious diseases".
• 24 Sept 2014. Stephane Guindon gave a very insightful look at the motivation of nested sampling. A key step was to utilize the alternative formula for an expected value, expressed as the integral of (1-F(y)) (one minus the cdf).
• 8 Oct 2014. Patricio Russel presented his PhD provisional talk on "Better Proposals for Bayesian phylogenetic".
• 22 Oct 2014. Russell presented the exchange paradox as an example of inconsistent inference arising from uniform priors. Then, Stephane presented reversible-jump calculations for trans-dimensional proposal distributions, showing how this resulted in a simple Metropolis-Hasting acceptance probability.
• 5 Nov 2014. Tim Vaughan lead a discussion on Richard Cox's seminal 1946 paper on "Probability, Frequency and Reasonable,Expectation", showing how the rules of probability can be justified from axiomatic arguments for plausibility of events.
• 19 Nov 2014. Russell Millar spoke on new developments in model comparison using information criteria, "Beyond DIC: New developments in Bayesian model comparison". We saw that the choice of targeted loss is a fundamental decision. pdf slides here