Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Bayes is big

When I was in graduate school, Bayesian statistics was a small, but important, part of my statistical inference curriculum. When I graduated, I all but forgot it. But a couple of years ago, I saw the storm on the horizon, and started furious self-study, including theory and computation. A few months ago, that storm hit shore. At the Joint Statistical Meetings 2007, I got raised eyebrows when I told former colleagues that life was turning me into a Bayesian, but I also met some prominent figures in the Bayesian biostatistics movement.

And now it's happening again.

About a year ago, I predicted over at Derek Lowe's excellent blog that a drug development program based on a full Bayesian approach would be 10 years off, though drug safety would probably see the largest immediate application. I was wrong. The storm is creeping inland. Be ready for it.