Customer Reviews

Bayesian Methods for Ecology

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I recently used this book for a class, and found it a good introduction for those already well familiar with classical frequentist techniques in ecology. It provides good cookbook recipes for doing an ANOVA, regression, etc with BUGS. The first chapter also cites some good reasons as to WHY one should use Bayes when they have prior information over other techniques. This was NOT however, a book that was particularly useful for those who want a thorough introduction to Bayes, warts and all, as well as giving one a real thorough understanding of Hierarchical modeling, which is arguably where Bayes can see it's best applications, particularly in ecology. The class as a whole felt like the book needs more thorough examples, more explanations of the WHYs, as well as the potential pitfalls, how to find problems with your models, as well as some applied problem sets. We also used Gelman and Hill's book, which has been excellent as a more thorough introduction, even if it is in the social sciences, and I have high hopes for James Clark's new book, although I have not seen a copy yet.

This book is a great little book for learning some code for programming in WinBUGS. I used it to supplement a course in Bayesian Data Analysis.