Publications by Gianluca Baio
Issue with thinning in R2OpenBUGS vs R2jags
While preparing the practicals for our course at the University of Alberta, I’ve discovered something kind of interesting. I’m sure this is nothing new and actually people who normally use both OpenBUGS and JAGS have already figured this out. But since I normally just use JAGS, it took me a bit to see this, so I thought I should post about ...
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My talks @ Universitat de Girona
Just after Easter, I’ll go for a very quick trip to lovely Girona, where Marc Saez has invited me to give two talks.The first one will be a re-run of the short course on INLA that I did at Bayes Pharma last year. It’s scheduled (and prepared) as a 3-hours talk, in which I briefly introduce the general Bayesian problem, quickly glance over the...
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Short course: Bayesian methods in health economics
Chris, Richard and I tested this last March in Canada (see also here) and things seem to have gone quite well. So we have decided to replicate the experiment (so that we can get a bigger sample size!) and do the short course this coming November (3-5th), at UCL.Full details (including links for registration) are available here. As we formally sa...
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BCEA 2.1
We’re about to release the new version of BCEA, which will contain some major changes.A couple of changes in the basic code that should improve the computational speed. In general, BCEA doesn’t really run into troubles because most of the computations are fairly easy. However, there are a couple of parts in which the code wasn’t really opti...
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Mini-tour
The last two days have been kind of a very interesting mini-tour for me $-$ yesterday the Symposium that we organised at UCL (the picture on the left is not a photo taken yesterday) and today the workshop on efficient methods for value of information, in Bristol.I think we’ll put the slides from yesterday’s talks on the symposium website sh...
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Bayes of thrones
My friend and colleague Andreas sent me a link to a working paper published by a statistician at the University of Christchurch (New Zealand) and discussed here. The main idea of the paper was to use a Bayesian model to predict the number of future chapters will each of the main characters of Game of Thrones feature in.I’m not a great fan of G...
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Conflict of interest
Disclaimer: I’m fully aware of the obvious conflict of interest here, but also I think that this looks really good, so I’ll write about it anyway.This post is to highlight that Marta‘s and Michela‘s book on Spatial and Spatio-temporal Bayesian Models with R – INLA is finally out (I think it can be pre-ordered although it will be offi...
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Beta unblockers
A couple of weeks ago, we’ve uploaded the new version of BCEA on CRAN, to include the function implementing our method for the computation of the EVPPI based on INLA-SPDE $-$ I’ve also already mentioned this here.While this is a stable version, we are still continuously testing many of the functions and so I thought I’d keep a beta version...
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Stress testing
Lately, we’ve been spending a lot of time “stress-testing” our method for the computation of the Expected Value of Partial Perfect Information (EVPPI $-$ I know: the terminology is a bit strange and possibly not-very helpful, as “perfect” information doesn’t really exist, in statistical terms…).I have mentioned this already here, he...
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Our new R package
As part of the work she’s doing for her PhD, Christina has done some (fairly major, I’d say!) review of the literature about prevalence studies on PCOS $-$ that’s a rather serious, albeit probably fair to say quite under-researched area. When it came to analysing the data she had collected, naturally I directed her towards doing some Baye...
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