J.K. Ghosh - Böcker

Bayesian nonparametrics has grown tremendously in the last three decades, especially in the last few years. This book is the first systematic treatment of Bayesian nonparametric methods and the theory behind them. While the book is of special interest to Bayesians, it will also appeal to statisticians in general because Bayesian nonparametrics offers a whole continuous spectrum of robust alternatives to purely parametric and purely nonparametric methods of classical statistics. The book is primarily aimed at graduate students and can be used as the text for a graduate course in Bayesian nonparametrics. Though the emphasis of the book is on nonparametrics, there is a substantial chapter on asymptotics of classical Bayesian parametric models. Jayanta Ghosh has been Director and Jawaharlal Nehru Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute and President of the International Statistical Institute. He is currently professor of statistics at Purdue University. He has been editor of Sankhya and served on the editorial boards of several journals including the Annals of Statistics. Apart from Bayesian analysis, his interests include asymptotics, stochastic modeling, high dimensional model selection, reliability and survival analysis and bioinformatics. R.V. Ramamoorthi is professor at the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. He has published papers in the areas of sufficiency invariance, comparison of experiments, nonparametric survival analysis and Bayesian analysis. In addition to Bayesian nonparametrics, he is currently interested in Bayesian networks and graphical models. He is on the editorial board of Sankhya.

It is an honor to be asked to write a foreword to this book, for I believe that it and other books to follow will eventually lead to a dramatic change in the current statistics curriculum in our universities. I spent the 1975-76 academic year at Florida State University in Tallahassee. My purpose was to complete a book on Statistical Reliability Theory with Frank Proschan. At the time, I was working on total time on test processes. At the same time, I started attending lectures by Dev Basu on statistical inference. It was Lehmann's hypothesis testing course and Lehmann's book was the text. However, I noticed something strange - Basu never opened the book. He was obviously not following it. Instead, he was giving a very elegant, measure theoretic treatment of the concepts of sufficiency, ancillarity, and invariance. He was interested in the concept of information - what it meant. - how it fitted in with contemporary statistics. As he looked at the fundamental ideas, the logic behind their use seemed to evaporate. I was shocked. I didn't like priors. I didn't like Bayesian statistics. But after the smoke had cleared, that was all that was left. Basu loves counterexamples. He is like an art critic in the field of statistical inference. He would find a counterexample to the Bayesian approach if he could. So far, he has failed in this respect.