Overview
Jon Wakefield is a biostatistician (Imperial College School of Medicine at St Mary's, London at time of DWW 1999; later University of Washington). His research spans Bayesian hierarchical models, MCMC methods, pharmacokinetics, and spatial statistics. He co-developed the ratio-of-uniforms method (Wakefield-Gelfand-Smith 1991) and the auxiliary variable Gibbs sampler with Damien and Walker.
Key Contributions / Features
- Wakefield-Gelfand-Smith (1991): Efficient random variate generation via the ratio-of-uniforms method; applicable to non-log-concave posteriors in non-linear mixed models.
- Damien-Wakefield-Walker (1999): Co-developer of the auxiliary variable Gibbs sampler; non-linear mixed-effects applications (orange-tree logistic growth) demonstrated the approach outperforms random-walk M-H in autocorrelation decay. See Auxiliary Variable Sampler.
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