Lambert - A student’s guide to Bayesian statistics

Some book acknowledgements are perfunctory; more a product of custom than an actual need to acknowledge the real contribution of others. Not in this case. I very much owe the contents of these pages to the efforts of others. This section is my insufficient effort to recognise the altruism of those people.

I first would like to thank those who helped me to write, shuffle, and remove the words in the various drafts of this book. In the books initial phase, Heather Harrington and Paul Kirk graciously provided me with useful feedback. My dad, Jean-Michel Johnston and Fergus Cooper benevolently gave up far too much time to reading various drafts of this work; your feedback has been invaluable in shaping this work. The Stan software forum has been an extremely useful source of information and the developers answers to my Stan-related questions has helped to shape the second half of this book. Singling out a few Stan people, I would like to thank Bob Carpenter, Michael Betancourt and Andrew Gelman.

At SAGE, I would first like to thank Katie Metzler (and, although not a Sager, Nick Allum) who helped start the process of getting this book made.