Re: [R] R vs. Bugs

2008-06-23 Thread Peter Muhlberg
Hi Paul & Brian: Thanks for your replies! Paul: Thank you for the encouragement. You're right that I don't need the working examples or Doodle generator in WinBugs. I'm wondering what open-source components could easily substitute for the core Bugs functionality? Do you know if any of these w

Re: [R] R vs. Bugs

2008-06-22 Thread Paul Johnson
Hey, good topic for a thread. I've wrestled with this over the years. I think there's some user confusion about what WinBUGS does. People who did not see BUGS before WinBUGS tend not to understand this in the same way... The unique / important contributions from WinBUGS are the collection of wo

Re: [R] R vs. Bugs

2008-06-22 Thread Peter Muhlberg
I've done some looking around in R and elsewhere to answer my question on the value of R vs. Bugs for MCMC. So, for anyone who is curious, here's what I think I've found: Bugs compiles its code, which should make it much faster than a pure R program. Packages such as AMCMC run MCMC in R, potenti

Re: [R] R vs. Bugs

2008-06-22 Thread Prof Brian Ripley
Your request is too vague for us to be very helpful. However OpenBUGS runs without very frequent crashes only on some ix86 Linux machines -- and what those are is unclear and Uwe Ligges and I (working on BRugs) have been unable to find one recently. There are dozens of Bayesian MCMC packages

[R] R vs. Bugs

2008-06-21 Thread Peter Muhlberg
A naive question from a non-statistician: I'm looking into running a Bayesian analysis of a model with high dimensionality. It's not a standard model (the likelihood requires a lot of code to implement), and I'm using a Linux machine. Was wondering if someone has any thoughts on what the advanta