Linear Mixed Models in Practice

Incorporating new and updated information, this second edition of THE bestselling text in Bayesian data analysis continues to emphasize practice over theory, describing how to conceptualize, perform, and critique statistical analyses from a Bayesian perspective.

Linear models courses are often presented as either theoretical or applied. Consequently, students may find themselves either proving theorems or using high-level procedures like PROC GLM to analyze data. There exists a gap between the derivation of formulas and analyses that hide these formulas behind attractive user interfaces. This book bridges that gap, demonstrating theory put into practice.

In today’s world, with an increase in the breadth and scope of real-world engineering optimization problems as well as with the advent of big data, improving the performance and efficiency of algorithms for solving such problems has become an indispensable need for specialists and researchers. In contrast to conventional books in the field that employ traditional single-stage computational, single-dimensional, and single-homogeneous optimization algorithms, this book addresses multiple newfound architectures for meta-heuristic music-inspired optimization algorithms. These proposed algorithms, with multi-stage computational, multi-dimensional, and multi-inhomogeneous structures, bring about a new direction in the architecture of meta-heuristic algorithms for solving complicated, real-world, large-scale, non-convex, non-smooth engineering optimization problems having a non-linear, mixed-integer nature with big data. The architectures of these new algorithms may also be appropriate for finding an optimal solution or a Pareto-optimal solution set with higher accuracy and speed in comparison to other optimization algorithms, when feasible regions of the solution space and/or dimensions of the optimization problem increase.