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[ebook]Tools for Statistical Inference

2008/4/3镜像同步11 回复

Tools for Statistical Inference: Methods for the Exploration of Posterior Distributions and Likelihood Functions Editorial Reviews Product Description This book provides a unified introduction to a variety of computational algorithms for likelihood and Bayesian inference. The third edition expands the discussion of many of the techniques discussed, includes additional examples, and adds exercise sets at the end of each chapter. This is a very well written text that is a particularly good reference on algorithms for the professional statistician. A nice feature is that it is concise and yet thorough. Many important problems in statistics are covered and presented through the deterministic and Monte Carlo techniques. Topics covered include the item response model, missing data and Bayesian methods. Most algorithms used to find maxima of posterior distributions can also be employed for maximizing likelihood. So those preferring classical inference can get a lot out of this book as well as the Bayesians. The orientation is toward the Bayesian approach however, with good coverage of prior and posterior distributions, conjugate priors and Bayesian Hierarchical Models. The last chapter on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods is mostly used for Bayesian inference. This is a great reference source but can also be used in a graduate level course on mathematical statistics, probably as a supplemental text. There are many useful exercises in this edition. The book is fairly advanced and presupposes an introduction to mathematical statistics at the level of the text by Bickel and Doksum. It also assumes that the reader has had some introduction to Bayesian methods but only at the level of, say, Box and Tiao's text. It does not assume any knowledge of stochastic processes including Markov chains. Convergence properties for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) are crucial to their success. Elements of discrete Markov chains are introduced in chapter 6 to make the algorithms understandable, but proof of convergence are avoided because they would involve a more detailed account of Markov chain theory. Tanner provides a good list of the references that were available in 1996. The research in MCMC methods is continuing to be intense and so there are many good references that have appeared since the publication of this book. Robert and Casella (1999) provides a more detailed and more current treatment but even that book is a couple of years dated. The EM and data augmentation algorthms are used for problems that are classified as missing data problems. The data may be missing as in a survey where particular questions are not answered by the respondents or it could be censored data as in a medical study or clinical trial. The censored data problem is illustrated by Tanner using the Stanford Heart Transplant data. Mixture models are also handled via these algorithms since the identification of the component that the observation belongs to can be viewed as missing data. Tanner demonstrates a wide variety of techniques to handle many important problems and he illustrates them on real data. It is nice to have all of this compactly written in just 200 pages! 附件(1.7MB) Tools_for_Statistical_Inference.djvu

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