A major recent development in statistics has been the use of fast computational methods of Markov chain Monte Carlo. These procedures allow Bayesian methods to be used in quite complex modelling situations. In this paper, we shall use a range of real data examples involving lapwings, shags,...

A model, involving a particular set of parameters, is said to be parameter redundant when the likelihood can be expressed in terms of a smaller set of parameters. In many important cases, the parameter redundancy of a model can be checked by evaluating the symbolic rank of a derivative matrix....