Overview
Adrian E. Raftery is Professor of Statistics and Sociology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research bridges Bayesian computation, model selection, and demographic forecasting. He developed or co-developed several widely used methods for assessing MCMC convergence (Raftery-Lewis 1992), computing Bayes factors from simulation output (Lewis-Raftery 1997), and Bayesian model averaging.
Key Contributions / Features
- Raftery-Lewis (1992): Diagnostic for determining how many Gibbs sampler iterations are required to estimate a quantile q of a target variable to within ±r with probability s. Computes required burn-in, thinning, and total iterations from a short pilot run; widely implemented in the
coda package. See Raftery-Lewis (1992).
- Kass-Raftery (1995): Comprehensive survey of Bayes factors — definition, computation methods (analytic, Laplace, importance sampling, MCMC), calibration via Jeffreys's (1961) qualitative scale, and sensitivity to priors. Standard reference for practitioners comparing models via Bayes factors.
- Lewis-Raftery (1997): Laplace-Metropolis estimator for computing integrated likelihoods from MCMC output — basic LM for fixed-effects models (posterior mode via multivariate median + robust variance estimate) and compound LM for hierarchical models (inner Laplace over random effects, outer LM over fixed effects + hyperparameters). Batch-means uncertainty assessment. See Lewis-Raftery (1997).
- Bayesian model averaging: Methodology for accounting for model uncertainty by averaging predictions across models weighted by their posterior probabilities; formalized in Raftery-Madigan-Hoeting (1997) and related papers.
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