Archive for Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences

Bayesian Workflow [book reviews]

Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 5, 2026 by xi'an

I thought I had posted a full-length review of the Bayesian Workflow, but the fact is I haven’t! Here is the blurb I wrote (upon request) for Chapman & Hall (and reproduced on Andrew’s blog):

“This original, thought-provoking, and transformative book is much much more than an implementation manual for Bayesian Data Analysis, even though it shares almost the same perspective. (The first sentence of the book states that the authors’ “conceptions of statistical practice, and of Bayesian statistics, have changed over the years”.) By providing a modus vivendi for undertaking Bayesian modelling from scratch in realistic settings where models are not magicked out of the blue, the authors explicit and rationalise the many steps required by such a bottom-up modelling protocol (“not a checklist, not a cookbook”, and not a flowchart!) in real situations. The contents read very well and very smoothly, with a seamless conjunction of intuition, modelling advices, computational details, and comparison tools. While unsurprisingly Bayesian, the perspective adopted therein remains both open and inclusive, with a welcome humility about the limitations and challenges of Bayesian workflows. This book should thus appeal to and profit a wide variety of readers, as providing guidance through an extensive collection of highly detailed examples, with shared code and exercises.”

introduction to Bayesian methods for the social sciences (18-22 Aug, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano)

Posted in Books, Mountains, R, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2025 by xi'an

new ISBA section on Bayesian Social Sciences [reposted]

Posted in Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 26, 2024 by xi'an

We are proposing a new section on Bayesian Social Sciences at ISBA. If you agree that this section would be useful, please add your name to the petition!

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in many Social Sciences: there have been applications in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Archaeology, Demography, Economics, Geography, History, Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology, among others. The appeal of the Bayesian framework may be philosophical, or may be practical, because of informative prior distributions, structured models which are well suited to Bayesian inference, or a strong need for uncertainty quantification.

Statisticians and practitioners have recently started meeting at workshops on Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences. The 2022 edition in Paris and 2024 edition in Amsterdam gathered around 80 participants each; work has started to prepare the 2026 edition.

To help organize this community, and to strengthen links between statisticians and practitioners in the Social Sciences, we propose to start a new ISBA section on Bayesian Social Sciences. To create a new section, the ISBA bylaws require a petition signed by at least 30 ISBA members.

If you are interested, you can read the proposed bylaws and add your name to the petition. Please forward to colleagues who might find this relevant!

The proposed initial section officers are:
Monica Alexander
Nial Friel
Adrian Raftery
Robin Ryder
EJ Wagenmakers