Summer 2024 Bayesian Learning Group

Model summary plots exploring trends in abundance over time for different species of rodents associated with the Portal Project. Data from the Portal Project teaching database via the ratdat R package (Ernest et al 2023). 

On August 9th, we wrapped up the summer session of the Bayesian Learning Group. The Bayesian Learning Group was launched in Spring 2024 by Jessica Guo and Renata Diaz, and Renata continued leading it over the summer. 

We were excited to have an almost completely new set of participants in this summer’s BLG! We met biweekly, working through examples of foundational concepts in applied Bayesian modeling based on the exercises in Richard McElreath’s Statistical Rethinking, and the excellent implementations in brms in Solomon Kurz’s bookdown book and Jake Thompson’s Solutions book (McElreath 2023, Kurz 2023, Thompson). We had a smaller group, which gave us the opportunity to take time each session to talk about applications to participants’ own fields of study. 

The Bayesian Learning Group has always been an evolving and somewhat experimental offering. We received excellent feedback from this summer’s participants, who emphasized the importance of having a casual environment to learn what can be challenging topics. Although we will not be running the Bayesian Learning Group this fall (because we will be offering our workshop series on Reproducibility and Data Science in R!), we are excited to continue to explore the ways we can support data science learning at UA!

Citations:

Ernest SM, Brown JH, Valone TJ, Culshaw-Maurer MJ, White EP (2023). ratdat: Portal Project Teaching Database_. R package version 1.1.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ratdat.

McElreath, R. (2020). Statistical rethinking: A Bayesian course with examples in R and Stan (2nd ed.). Chapman & Hall/CRC. 

Kurz, A. Solomon (2023). Statistical rethinking with brms, ggplot2, and the tidyverse (2nd Edition). https://bookdown.org/content/4857/ 

Thompson, Jake. Statistical Rethinking: Solutions (2nd Edition). https://sr2-solutions.wjakethompson.com/