Spring 2014: Meetings 4-6

The 6th and final meeting of the quarter will take place next Thur, June 5 (the last week of classes). Meetings 4-5 (May 22, and May 29) discussed Bayesian inference in more detail (e.g., how to do model comparison with Bayes factors), and introduced MCMC estimation and the way JAGS enables us to do MCMC based on little more than a specification of the probabilistic model we assume generated the data. We started by estimating posterior distributions for very simple models with both continuous (normally-distributed) responses and categorical (Bernoulli-distributed) responses.

The last meeting of the quarter will be dedicated to a discussion of Bayesian inference for more complex / realistic linear models.

We will probably continue with the 2 books mentioned in the previous post (Bayesian Cognitive Modeling: A Practical Course, Lee & Wagenmakers 2014, and Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning, Oaksford & Chater 2007) over the summer.