Preface

This book is a relatively gentle introduction to carrying out Bayesian data analysis and cognitive modeling using the probabilistic programming language Stan (Carpenter et al. 2017), and the front-end to Stan called brms (Bürkner 2019). Our target audience is cognitive scientists (e.g., linguists and psychologists) who carry out behavioral experiments, and who are interested in learning the Bayesian data analysis methodology from the ground up and in a principled manner. Our aim is to make Bayesian statistics a standard part of the data analysis toolkit for experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, and related disciplines.

Many excellent introductory textbooks exist already for Bayesian data analysis. Why write yet another book? Our text is different from other attempts in two respects. First, our main focus is on showing how to analyze data from planned experiments involving repeated measures; this type of experimental data involves unique complexities. We provide many examples of data-sets involving eyetracking (visual world and reading), self-paced reading, event-related potentials, reaction time, acceptability rating judgements, speeded grammaticality judgements, and question-response accuracies. Second, from the very outset, we stress a particular workflow that has as its centerpiece simulating data; we aim to teach a philosophy that involves thinking hard about the assumed underlying generative process, even before the data are collected. The data analysis approach that we hope to teach through this book involves a cycle of prior predictive and posterior predictive checks, and model validation using simulated data. We try to inculcate a sense of how inferences can be drawn from the posterior distribution of theoretically interesting parameters without resorting to binary decisions like “significant” or “not-significant”. We are hopeful that this will set a new standard for reporting results of data analyses in a more nuanced manner, and lead to more measured claims in the published literature.

References

Bürkner, Paul-Christian. 2019. Brms: Bayesian Regression Models Using ’Stan’. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=brms.

Carpenter, Bob, Andrew Gelman, Matthew D Hoffman, Daniel Lee, Ben Goodrich, Michael Betancourt, Marcus Brubaker, Jiqiang Guo, Peter Li, and Allen Riddell. 2017. “Stan: A Probabilistic Programming Language.” Journal of Statistical Software 76 (1). Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States); Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States).