Statistical Rethinking, Edition 2: ETA March 2020

Abstraction: Richard McElreath announces second edition changes to Bayesian statistics textbook

Key points:

• Second edition of Statistical Rethinking (targeting March 2020) by Richard McElreath (anthropologist/human evolution researcher at MPI); uses R and Stan
• Key changes: map renamed to quap (quadratic approximation); map2stan replaced by more flexible ulam; much more prior predictive simulation added
• Multiple regression chapter split in two: helpful uses vs. misleading uses, with explicit causal inference via DAGs (directed acyclic graphs)
• New model types: splines (ch.4), robust regression (ch.7), ordered categorical predictors (ch.12), social network models (ch.13), phylogenetic regression (ch.14), ODE models (ch.16)
• Teaching philosophy: force explicit specification of every model assumption; MCMC not introduced until halfway through book; quadratic approximation used first half to separate Bayes from MCMC
• More raw Stan code presented to ease transition to direct Stan use

Connections: Richard Mcelreath · Bayesian Statistics · Statistical Modeling · Mcmc · Causal Inference

Source: http://elevanth.org/blog/2018/07/14/statistical-rethinking-edition-2-eta-2020/