If, in the mid 1980's, one had asked the average statistician about the difficulties of using Bayesian Statistics, his/her most likely answer would have been"Well, there is this problem of selecting a prior distribution and then, even if one agrees on the prior, the whole Bayesian inference is...

If, in the mid 1980?s, one had asked the average statistician about the difficulties of using Bayesian Statistics, his/her most likely answer would have been ?Well, there is this problem of selecting a prior distribution and then, even if one agrees on the prior, the whole Bayesian inference is...

The missionary zeal of many Bayesians of old has been matched, in the other direction, by an attitude among some theoreticians that Bayesian methods were absurd—not merely misguided but obviously wrong in principle. We consider several examples, beginning with Feller's classic text on...

In 1996, Propp and Wilson introduced coupling from the past (CFTP), an algorithm for generating a sample from the exact stationary distribution of a Markov chain. In 1998, Fill proposed another so–called perfect sampling algorithm. These algorithms have enormous potential in Markov Chain Monte...

Reversible jump methods are the most commonly used Markov chain Monte Carlo tool for exploring variable dimension statistical models. Recently, however, an alternative approach based on birth-and-death processes has been proposed by Stephens for mixtures of distributions. We show that the...

Mixture models may be a useful and flexible tool to describe data with a complicated structure, for instance characterized by multimodality or asymmetry. In a Bayesian setting, it is a well established fact that one need to be careful in using improper prior distributions, since the posterior...

A new approach to inference in state space models is proposed, based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC avoids evaluation of the likelihood function by matching observed summary statistics with statistics computed from data simulated from the true process; exact inference being...

For numerous models, it is impossible to conduct an exact Bayesian inference. There are many cases where the derivation of the posterior distribution leads to intractable calculations (due to the fact that this generally involves intractable integrations). The Bayesian computational literature...

This thesis presents contributions to the Monte Carlo methodology used in Bayesian statistics. The Bayesian framework is one of the main approaches to statistics and includes a rich methodology to perform inference and model choice. However, as statistical models become more realistic and drift...

Our aim is to analyze the link between optimism and risk aversion in a subjective expected utility setting and to estimate the average level of optimism when weighted by risk tolerance. Its estimation leads to a non-trivial statistical problem. We start from a large lottery survey (1536...