Last week, I received a box of books from the International Statistical Review, for reviewing them. I thus grabbed the one whose title was most appealing to me, namely Bayesian Model Selection and Statistical Modeling by Tomohiro Ando. I am indeed interested in both the nature of testing hypotheses or more accurately of assessing models, as discussed in both my talk at the Seminar of philosophy of mathematics at Université Paris Diderot a few days ago and the post on Murray Aitkin’s alternative, and the computational aspects of the resulting Bayesian procedures, including evidence, the Savage-Dickey paradox, nested sampling, harmonic mean estimators, and more…
After reading through the book, I am alas rather disappointed. What I consider to be innovative or at least “novel” parts with comparison with existing books (like Chen, Shao and Ibrahim, 2000, which remains a reference on this topic) is based on papers written by the author over the past five years and it is mostly a sort of asymptotic Bayes analysis that I do not see as particularly Bayesian, because involving the “true” distribution of the data. The coverage of the existing literature on Bayesian model choice is often incomplete and sometimes misses the point, as discussed below. This is especially true for the computational aspects that are generally mistreated or at least not treated in a way from which a newcomer to the field would benefit. The author often takes complex econometric examples for illustration, which is nice; however, he does not pursue the details far enough for the reader to be able to replicate the study without further reading. (An example is given by the coverage of stochastic volatility in Section 4.5.1, pages 83-84.) The few exercises at the end of each chapter are rather unhelpful, often sounding rather like notes than true problems (an extreme case is Exercise 6 pages 196-197 which introduces the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm within the exercise (although it has already been defined on pages 66-67) and then asks to derive the marginal likelihood estimator. Another such exercise on page 164-165 introduces the theory of DNA microarrays and gene expression in ten lines (which are later repeated verbatim on page 227), then asks to identify marker genes responsible for a certain trait.) The overall feeling after reading this book is thus that the contribution to the field of Bayesian Model Selection and Statistical Modeling is too limited and disorganised for the book to be recommended as “helping you choose the right Bayesian model” (backcover).
I actually 
, only for those in Paris next Monday, Andrew Gelman will give a talk at Université Denis Diderot (Paris 7) on 
