With Dr. Noam Siegelman, January 15, 2019

ARiEAL Researcher, Dr. Victor Kuperman at the Reading Lab, is hosting a “Words in the World” workshop on “Introduction to Bayesian modeling using JAGS” on January 15, 2019. The workshop will be presented by Dr. Noam Siegelman from Haskins Laboratories.

In recent years, Bayesian inference is gaining increasing popularity. This workshop will serve as a brief introduction to this exciting alternative analytical approach, focusing on do-it-yourself modeling techniques, which allow for maximal flexibility and transparency in data analysis. In a nutshell, such techniques are based on the specification of a generative model that presumably gives rise to the observed data. To do so, one specifies the relevant latent parameters, prior distributions regarding these parameters (reflecting researchers’ a-priori knowledge), and relations between the various parameters as well as between parameters and observed data. Dr. Noam Siegelman will go over basic concepts such as prior and posterior distributions, learn how to specify and interpret graphical models, and practice the implementation of such models using R and JAGS. He will also discuss the difference between Bayesian modeling and Bayesian statistics and the relation between Bayesian parameter estimation and Bayesian model selection via Bayes Factors.