Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Bayesian Analysis Of Data On Nest Success For Marsh Birds, Sean Hardy

Honors College

Bayesian methods are an increasingly popular form of statistical analysis which uses informative prior distributions to help calculate posterior distributions of models that represent different hypotheses. Frequentist methods are contrasting methods that are used more commonly and more well known, but have come under recent criticism. I examined data gathered by Ellen Robertson, who used information theoretic methods for a Masters’ Thesis in Ecology and Environmental Science at the University of Maine to analyze the daily survival probabilities of marsh birds with a Bayesian perspective in order to get a sense of the Bayesian analysis. Results were as expected; when …