What and why

Kruschke began his text with “This book explains how to actually do Bayesian data analysis, by real people (like you), for realistic data (like yours).” In the same way, this project is designed to help those real people do Bayesian data analysis. My contribution is converting Kruschke’s JAGS code for use in Bürkner’s brms package, which makes it easier to fit Bayesian regression models in R using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). I also prefer plotting and data wrangling with the packages from the tidyverse. So we’ll be using those methods, too.

This project is not meant to stand alone. It’s a supplement to the second edition of Kruschke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis. Please give the source material some love.

Caution: Work in progress

The first release of this project only contained Chapters 1 through 5. Version 0.0.2 added Chapters 6 through 10. Version 0.0.3 added Chapters 11, 12, and 15 through 18, with placeholders for Chapters 13 and 14. Version 0.0.4 added Chapters 19 through 21. Welcome to version 0.0.5! The notable updates are:

  • the addition of Chapter 22 for multinomial regression,
  • more prose and resource links in Chapters 13 and 14,
  • adoption of the patchwork package for combining ggplots, and
  • minor typo fixes throughout.

Several sections still remain in Chapters 7 and 11 that I have yet to master. They and other difficulties are detailed in the GitHub progress log. If you would like to share your solutions to those sections or any other section in the project, please open an issue in this project’s GitHub repository. It would be a tremendous help.

Content will continue trickling in as I get to it.