1.2 Prerequisites and Further Reading 3
We thus expect readers to place themselves in a realistic situation to con-
duct this analysis in life-threatening (or job-threatening) situations. As de-
tailed in the preface, the course was originally intended for students in the
last year of study toward a professional degree, and it seems quite reasonable
to insist that they face similar situations before entering their incoming job!
1.2 Prerequisites and Further Reading
This being a textbook about statistical modeling, the students are supposed to
have a background in both probability and statistics, at the level, for instance,
of Casella and Berger (2001). In particular, a knowledge of standard sampling
distributions and their properties is desirable. Lab work in the spirit of Nolan
and Speed (2000) is also a plus. (One should read in particular their Ap-
pendix A on “How to write lab reports?”) Further knowledge about Bayesian
statistics is not a requirement, although using Robert (2007)orHoff (2009)
as further references would bring a better insight into the topics treated here.
Similarly, we expect students to be able to understand the bits of R pro-
grams provided in the analysis, mostly because the syntax of R is very simple.
We include an introduction to this language in this chapter and we refer to
Dalgaard (2002) for a deeper entry and also to Venables and Ripley (2002).
Besides Robert (2007), the philosophy of which is obviously reflected in this
book, other reference books pertaining to applied Bayesian statistics include
Gelman et al. (2013), Carlin and Louis (1996), and Congdon (2001, 2003).
More specific books that cover parts of the topics of a given chapter are
mentioned (with moderation) in the corresponding chapter, but we can quote
here the relevant books of Holmes et al. (2002), Pole et al. (1994), and Gill
(2002). We want to stress that the citations are limited for efficiency purposes:
There is no extensive coverage of the literature as in, e.g., Robert (2007)or
Gelman et al. (2013), because the prime purpose of the book is to provide
a working methodology, for which incremental improvements and historical
perspectives are not directly relevant.
While we also cover simulation-based techniques in a self-contained per-
spective, and thus do not assume prior knowledge of Monte Carlo methods,
detailed references are Robert and Casella (2004, 2009)andChen et al. (2000).
Although we had at some stage intended to write a new chapter about
hierarchical Bayes analysis, we ended up not including this chapter in the
current edition and this for several reasons. First, we were not completely
convinced about the relevance of a specific hierarchical chapter, given that
the hierarchical theme is somehow transversal to the book and pops in the
mixture (Chap. 6), dynamic (Chap. 7) and image (Chap. 8) chapters. Second,
the revision took already too long and creating a brand new chapter did not
sound a manageable goal. Third, managing realistic hierarchical models meant
relying on codes written in JAGS and BUGS, which clashed with the philoso-
phy of backing the whole book on R codes. This was subsumed by the recent
and highly relevant publication of The BUGS Book (Lunn et al., 2012)andby
the incoming new edition of Bayesian Data Analysis (Gelman et al., 2013).