MAS8391, MMathStat Projects

Lecture notes etc. for background reading

My projects usually use Bayesian inference and (almost certainly) Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. These are numerical methods for evaluating posterior distributions. Therefore, below, I have given links to some very brief notes on MCMC (copy and paste from some old lecture notes) and the complete notes for the 2012-13 version of my section of MAS8303. The first half of MAS8303, given by Dr Shi, covered the principles of MCMC. The ``Brief Introduction'' is instead of that. You don't need to know all of the theory at this stage. The second half of MAS8303, which I taught, was really about practical applications and this is probably of more interest at this stage so all of the notes are given here.

Very Brief Introduction to MCMC.
Notes from course for Statistics Postgrads on MCMC and BRugs including some historical notes. Here is the LateX file.
MAS8303 notes.
JAGS manual.
rjags manual.
JAGS version of MAS8303 Chapter 2.
Some notes on how to use rjags for survival problems.
Here is some Beamer material which might be useful. It might be useful for some of the commands but you can probably do better than me in terms of presentation. You might want to try a different "theme". You should do the recommended things in terms of introductions and conclusions because there will be marks for these. (I tend to do these things verbally rather than on the slides but perhaps you should have them visible on the slides).
- A talk which I gave to a general audience: slides, LaTeX
- Chapter 4 of MAS8303: slides, LaTeX
- A recent technical talk - rather long, too many equations and not enough pictures, I think!: slides, LaTeX. On slide 23, one of the colours did not show very well when I used the projector. The projectors are not calibrated for colours the same as the computer screens so it is a good idea to try your slides with a projector (and, if possible, the projector which you will use) in advance.
Here is some material which might help with using BibTeX.
- An example LaTeX file.
- The bibliography database file to go with it.
- The bibliography style file which you will need for this example.
Here are two examples of LaTeX files to make posters.
- Wilson and Farrow
- Germain, Boys and Farrow
You will notice the "portrait" option. I guess that you change this to "landscape" if you want landscape format.
Data sets:
BUGS (JAGS) model specifications:
- Loglinear models: Babies
- Loglinear models: Tonsils