This is an eight-week online course for people who are looking for a practical introduction to fitting Bayesian ecological models in JAGS. The course will cover the following topics: preparing data for JAGS, specifying prior distributions, coding models in the JAGS dialect of the BUGS language, providing initial values, getting MCMC samples, evaluating convergence, summarizing posterior distributions, model validation, and common errors and pitfalls.
Each week, students can expect a shorter theoretical portion and longer practical portion. We will start with basic intercept-only models, and slowly add complexity with fixed and random effects. The models covered will include:. Each week, students will be expected to spend approximately one hour of additional time on a short exercise intended to deepen their understanding of the material. Students will be provided with access to an online book summarizing the material covered.
The course will be recorded and students will have access to these recordings until one month after the course concludes.
Nicole Hill works for Poisson Consulting Ltd. She specializes in population dynamics and abundance estimation, and actively maintains several R packages on GitHub.
Nicole is passionate about sharing knowledge and empowering others to navigate the complexities of statistical modelling. Registration includes free access to the cloud version of Posit RStudio , the course workbook, and course recordings for one month after the course concludes.
