I’ll be giving a few public courses in the next few months that might be of interest to the Stan community.
On Friday, April 13 Sean Talts and I will be teaching a one-day introduction to Stan at the New England Statistics Symposium in Amherst, Massachusetts, https://symposium.nestat.org. The focus will be on establishing a robust workflow. I’ll also be staying for the talks on Saturday, April 14 in case anyone will be around.
On Monday, June 18 through Wednesday, June 20 I’ll also be teaching a more in-depth three-day Stan course in London, https://www.jumpingrivers.com/courses/26_bayesian-inference-stan-time-series. This course will cover foundations through some of the state-of-the-art techniques that we’ve been developing in our research.
If you’re interested in hiring me to give a course for your organization or help co-host a public course then please don’t hesitate to reach out, https://betanalpha.github.io/consulting/.
I’ve been to Michael’s courses and would highly recommend them. Even if you’re like me and find Michael’s theory papers too hard, his courses are very clear, hands-on, and down-to-earth. As advertised, they’re very directed toward conveying a practical methdology for Bayesian statistics using Stan.
Ben and I teach very different classes so there is already plenty of complementary material between the two, but I’ll also be incorporating lots of our new workflow results into the upcoming courses so there will be plenty of new content as well.
@betanalpha
I’ve signed up to the London course and looking forward to it, but I’ve yet to receive information on the location it is being held from jumping rivers. Do you know where in London the course will be? I need to book flights asap and London is a big place with different airports!
I believe the course venue is still being finalized – it’s best to email Jumping Rivers directly for more information. Fortunately the public transportation in London is quite good and you can readily get into downtown London, and from there anywhere the course might be, from all of the nearby airports, including Heathrow (Heathrow Express, Picadilly Line), London City Airport, Gatwick (Gatwick Express), Luton (Thameslink, East Midlands), and Stansted (Greater Anglia). I mostly used Heathrow and Gatwick when I was based in London.
Thanks @betanalpha - I have asked them but they have not gotten back to me as yet. I know London well enough and I’m only 50 mins flight time away, hence I know that flying in and out of the right airport is the difference between an extra nights stay or not and as I’m paying for it all myself and Ryanair have a sale on I’m keen to book. Anyhow - I appreciate your response, many thanks.
If you don’t get a response within the next few days let me know and I’ll follow up on my end. Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience! I hope the course will definitely be worth it. ;-)
Thanks very much Michael! Much appreciated.
I have struggled to self-teach Stan, so if the course can push me to a level where I understand the workflow better and can build the simpler models I want to work with, and ask sensible questions on the forum about more complex models when the need arises I will be happy!
Hi @betanalpha - looking forward to the course next week. I was wondering do I need a laptop with alot of processing power, or would a 12" Macbook with 8GB RAM be sufficient ?
Likely probability theory and common distributions, Bayesian inference, a principled Bayesian model building workflow, regression modeling – the official course announcement will have specifics.
Australia next February, but otherwise my only other courses at the moment are all private. If you know of anyone interested in helping to host a course please let me know!