TITLE: AN INTRODUCTION TO BAYESIAN STATISTICS WITH MCMC FOR ANIMAL GENETIC IMPROVEMENT

TEACHERS: Agustín Blasco (theory) and Marina Martínez Álvaro (problems)

              

LANGUAGE: English

DATES: 15 to 19 June 2026

TIME: 15:00 to 19:00 CEST (Valencia time)

FEE: 300 €

REGISTER ONLINE: It has two steps: First, click here to create an account. Second, click Register to be registered.

LECTURE NOTES: The course is based on the book by Agustin Blasco Bayesian data Analysis for Animal Scientists (Springer, 2017).

COMPUTER PROGRAMS FOR PRACTICAL EXERCISES: Public software and software developed by the teachers will be used for practical exercises. Although it is not needed to know R for the course, to run some programs, R 4.3.2 or later version is required to be installed in the participant's laptop.

 

            PROGRAM

MONDAY

  1. Do we understand classical statistics?

  2. The Bayesian choice

  Lab: Bayesian analyses with the program Rabbit

 

TUESDAY 16

  3. Posterior distributions

  4. MCMC

  5. The baby model 

  Lab: MCMC analyses by hand

 

WEDNESDAY 17 

  6. The Linear model. I. The "fixed effects" model 

  7. The Linear model. II. The "mixed" model

  Lab: Software for genetic analyses

 

THURSDAY 18

  8. The Bayesian alphabet

 

FRIDAY 19

  9. Prior information

 10. Model choice

  Lab: Software for genetic analyses