A crash course in Bayesian inference

CLE Retreat 2023

What you can expect from this workshop:

Learn the conceptual whys and wherefores of Bayesian inference.
Get hands-on practice fitting Bayesian models in R using brms.
Have some conversations, some individual work, and plenty of chances to ask questions.

Intended audience:

You know how to use R and RStudio.
You are familiar with linear regression models and want to know how to think about them from a Bayesian perspective.

Pre-workshop set-up

To be able to run the code we’ll use, please follow the set-up instructions here, and make sure everything is running before the workshop begins.

To check whether CmdStan has been correctly installed, you can run the following code in RStudio’s console:

library(cmdstanr)
file <- file.path(cmdstan_path(), "examples", "bernoulli", "bernoulli.stan")
mod  <- cmdstan_model(file)

If running this code produces no errors and you end up with an object mod in your Environment pane, then you’re good to go!

Also make sure the following packages are installed:

Thanks to n loewen for help coming up with the workshop name :)